The Free State Project (FSP) is a political movement, founded in 2001, to recruit at least 20,000 libertarian-leaning people to move to a single low-population state (New Hampshire, selected in 2003) in order to make the state a stronghold for libertarian ideas. The project seeks to overcome the historical ineffectiveness of limited-government activism by the small, diffuse population of activists across the 50 United States and around the world.
Participants sign a statement of intent declaring that they intend to move to New Hampshire within five years of the drive reaching 20,000 participants, or other self-selected triggers. As of June 2011, more than 1,000 FSP participants have become "early movers" to New Hampshire, in that they have made their move prior to the 20,000-participant trigger. As of November 2012, over 13,000 people have signed this statement of intent and more than 1,100 have moved. In 2010, at least 12 "Free Staters" (early project movers) were elected to the 400-member New Hampshire House of Representatives.
The Free State Project is a social movement generally based upon decentralized decision making. A control group that performs various activities, but most of FSP's activities depend upon volunteers, and no formal plan dictates to participants or movers what their actions should be in New Hampshire.
Read more about Free State Project: Intent, History, Ideology and Political Positions, Annual Events, Responses
Famous quotes containing the words free, state and/or project:
“If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again,—if you have paid your debts and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“He was discontented and wasted his life into the bargain; and yet he rated it as a gain in coming to America, that here you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day. But the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The candidate tells us we are the “backbone of the State,” and we know that it is true, not because we are possessed of certain endowed virtues, but because we are a majority and have the vote.”
—Federal Writers’ Project Of The Wor, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)