Talking to the press is risky; you don't know how accurately they're going to represent your views. I think this story captures the gist of my relationship with the Free State Project, but it doesn't really explain *what changed* such that I no longer identify as a "Free Stater."
One of the downsides of accepting young people in a political movement is that their views are not fixed and they might not be wholly reliable in the future. I was a committed anarchist when I moved to New Hampshire (age 22) and when I decided to run for office (age 25).
I had observed that Republicans and small-l libertarians had formed a successful coalition around economic issues (for better or for worse)...
...and I wanted to foment a mirror coalition between Democrats and small-l libertarians on issues like harm reduction, civil liberties, and criminal justice reform.
When I won my primary in Sept. 2014, it really sunk in that I would have a small amount of decision-making power over other people's lives. This motivated me to read about cognitive biases, probability, what it even means to "believe" something...
...and internalizing my readings on these topics transformed my worldview. I stopped lazily straddling the line between deontology and consequentialism and realized that my real ethics were consequentialist.
To me, what ultimately matters in the world is whether or not people live happy lives with autonomy and minimal suffering. (Insert caveats and cautions about human beings doing consequentialism.)
I read How to Actually Change Your Mind. wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How_To_Ac…
I read the Non-Libertarian FAQ. slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/rep…
I admitted to myself that libertarian responses to problems like air and water pollution had never been fully satisfying. Maximizing for "liberty," especially a narrow, propertarian conception of liberty, sometimes trades off against human flourishing in ways I find unacceptable.
Structural inequality caused by oppression, both recent and current, became much more salient to me. I noticed how widespread the Just World Fallacy is amongst my libertarian friends...
I decided that the existence of coordination problems and negative externalities can justify government action. I also became much more comfortable with uncertainty and tradeoffs, which is good, because the world is a messy place and many policy areas are thorny and complicated.
Anyway, my original plan - to focus my efforts on policy areas where Democrats/progressives and libertarians could work together - still seemed like a pretty good plan. Mass incarceration still seemed like a worthy target.
To my criteria of 1. Appeals to progressives and 2. Appeals to libertarians, I added 3. A strong evidence base.
Sidebar, did you know that "at typical policy margins in the United States today, decarceration has zero net impact on crime outside of prison"? openphilanthropy.org/blog/impact-in…
Ultimately, the question of "Are you a Free Stater"? comes down to definitions, like so many questions. If Free Stater means somebody who associates often with Free Staters, then yes, I am; about half my local friends are Free Staters.
If Free Stater means somebody who moved to NH after signing the Statement of Intent, then I'm a Free Stater. But I think the definition that best allows you to predict somebody's voting record is whether or not they endorse the vision from the Statement of Intent...
The Statement of Intent is very deontological (very rule-based), so I don't endorse it. I think a society where government does more than just "protect life, liberty, and property" can be better than a society with such a narrowly constrained government.
Another way to think about whether somebody is a "Free Stater" is whether or not they want the FSP to succeed...
To the extent that I think preference utilitarianism has merit, I think it's good when people with strong beliefs self-sort into different jurisdictions where their preferences can be satisfied, and to that extent I want the FSP to succeed.
But quoting my @nhpr interview... "If the Free State Project means that a lot of people who don't vaccinate their kids move here and it causes...outbreaks of vaccine-preventable illnesses and deaths, then in that sense I definitely don't want the Free State Project to succeed."
I want Free Staters to succeed at making New Hampshire better and fail at making New Hampshire worse.
