Monday, June 2, 2008

Towards a Free Nation

In 1993, Richard O. Hammer asked:

"Imagine you are on a ship and there are no lifeboats. A hole breaks in the hull. Water gushes in. Many people bail. They yell to you, 'bail, bail!' But you can not tell if bailing will save the ship. You look around and see materials which might be made into crude lifeboats. Do you bail, or build?"
He goes on:

There have been several attempts to start small, libertarian countries. All have failed. A book, How to Start your own Country, by Erwin S. Strauss, tells about these attempts. It seems to me that none of these attempts had a significant chance. Not enough groundwork had been done before the flags were hoisted. The approach of the Free Nation Foundation differs. It proposes, for the time, to do nothing but groundwork. It would not suggest trying to obtain real estate till the force of a nation — people, assets, treaties — were in place. This is a "Front Door" approach. We would seek what we want openly, through negotiations in good faith, from a position of practical and financial strength.
For seven years Mr. Hammer worked full time to manage and lead Free Nation Foundation (FNF). It failed to sustain itself financially and Mr. Hammer withdrew "from full-time work in FNF to seek more remunerative work".

A daugther organization, The Libertarian Nation Foundation, was formed in 2001, which aims to:

To advance the day when coercive institutions of government can be replaced by voluntary institutions of civil mutual consent, by developing clear and believable descriptions of those voluntary institutions, and by building a community of people who share confidence in these descriptions.
An index of links to a large number of online articles is here (for example, Spontaneous Order). At the top, this page quotes:

The market in the broadest sense of the term is the process that encompasses all voluntary and spontaneous actions of men. It is the realm of human initiative and freedom and the soil upon which all human achievements thrive.
~Ludwig von Mises

A Free Nation, anyone?

0 comments: