The Free State Project: Move and Live Free?

February 27, 2004

Transcript prepared from a tape recording

Proceedings:
MR. GREVE:  [In progress.]  -- square miles, I should say.  They'll still live there 90 years from now, not the same people but the same family.  That's almost unimaginable in this country, and it has been ever so, and it was anticipated that the nation would be very mobile at the very beginning.  One of the constitutional provisions that's vastly underrated is the privileges and immunities clause in Article IV, which entitles American citizens--or, rather, the citizens of one state to all the privileges and immunities of another state on the same basis as is enjoyed by those citizens.

You can see that also, by the way, in the establishment clause, which, of course, forbids Congress, as originally designed, forbids Congress to establish a religion but not the States, and the reason was that the Founders expected a great deal of religious diversity within the states, and it was there and people did move for that reason.

If you look back at the general provision of the privileges and immunities clause, partly it's there because in a nation you cannot really tolerate states to control their borders or to exclude fellow citizens, but there's also partly a utilitarian reason for the clause, namely, what we now call Tiebout competition, or competition for productive citizens.  It's worth reading the predecessor of--the privileges and immunities clause was actually an abridged version of the same provisions, same Article IV in the Articles of Confederation.  It was shortened by Governor Morris because he thought it was too wordy, but it's worth reading the original version.  And here it goes:

"The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse among the people of the different states in this union, the free inhabitants of each of these states, paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several states, and the people of each state shall have free ingress and regress to and from any other state, and shall enjoy therein all the privileges of trade and commerce, subject to the same duties, impositions, and restrictions as the inhabitants thereof, respectively..." and then it goes on to say that you can take your property with you.

Now, of course, in modern times the United States Supreme Court has held that states must even extend welfare benefits on an equal basis.  They cannot have residency requirements and rules.  In other words, now the paupers may not only be not excluded, they may also help themselves to all the benefits that the citizens of the respective states have worked for.  If you think that makes no sense--of course, it makes no sense.  It's a Supreme Court decision.

The great mobility that you see reflected both in history and in these constitutional arrangements I think may have special salience now in modern days.  For one thing, what's generally called the new economy has enormously increased people's mobility.  Neither firms nor individuals are as tied as they once were, either to natural resources and to accidental distribution, or to large-scale production facilities.  And by the same token, communication has become much easier, and coordination, concerted action, has become much cheaper, which explains why something like the Free State Project, which Jason will talk about, is now organizable, whereas it would have been very difficult in a different age.

At the same time, while that is occurring, I think what we've seen at the national level over the past few years is a total wipe-out of libertarian policies or politics, I think, as an organized force now.  Part of that has to do with the fact that we happen to be at war, and that has consequences both with respect to the deployment of American forces, with respect to the budget, with respect to things like the PATRIOT Act.  But we've also had things that have absolutely nothing to do with the war.

We've had the No Child Left Behind Act, which is really an extraordinary imposition on state and local governments with accompanying budget increases of over 50 percent.

We've had the "No Geezer Left Behind Act," also known as Medicare extension, which, by my count, increases in cost by about $2 billion a day.  That's before it's kicking in.

We've had Sarbanes-Oxley which accomplished something that, interestingly, the New Deal tried to do but never accomplished, which was the nationalization of American corporate governance law.

We've had a domestic spending explosion.  We've had the collapse of a free trade agenda.  We've had tax cuts, but if the pundits are to be believed, those may prove temporary.

You cannot, of course, run away from any of that, at least not within the United States.  But it seems to me that people choose on the margins that they have, that are left to them, and sometimes they do that by escaping into private institutions, and sometimes they do that by paying more attention to the additional burdens that state and local governments pile on top of the inescapable federal burdens.

That's my two minutes' worth.  I have no idea whether any of it is true.  But we have a terrific panel here to explore these questions, and we'll start with Jason Sorens, who is the creative genius of the Free State Project.  He's also a political science lecturer at Yale University.  And, by the way, in your info packs, there are longer biographies.  I'll just cut this short.

We'll next go to Mike Barone, a senior editor with U.S. News & World Report, and the principal author of "The Almanac of American Politics."

We'll then go to Richard Vedder, a distinguished professor of economics at Ohio University and, I am proud to say, also an AEI adjunct scholar.  His research focuses on public finance and labor market questions.

And, finally, we'll go to Alan Bock, who has been a member of the Orange County Register's editorial staff since 1980 and is currently a senior editorial writer there.  He was also the executive director of the Libertarian Advocate and a Washington correspondent for Reason magazine.

So to start our libertarian song festival, Jason Sorens.

MR. SORENS:  Thanks, Michael.

I'm going to start by explaining the basics of the Free State Project, who we are, what we're doing.  And then I'm going to place the Free State Project within the context of two different models of competitive federalism, and I hope I don't upstage the economist on the panel by doing so, these two economic models.  Finally, I'm going to discuss the implications for the future.

The Free State Project started as an effort to identify the best state in the country for people who favor smaller government and stronger individual liberties to move to.  Unlike other organizations that rate and rank the states on various criteria, we took an additional step of actually signing up people who are willing to move, and I'll talk about why that's important later.

We started signing up people in September 2001, and our growth was slow in our first few months.  However, growth picked up dramatically in late 2002 and 2003, and by August 2003, we had 5,000 signed members.

We then had everyone vote on a state to move to from a list of ten candidates, all low-population states.  And on October 1, 2003, we announced that New Hampshire had won the votes hands down.  So now we're continuing to recruit people to move to New Hampshire, and we hope to get 20,000 commitments by September 2006.

I see the Free State Project as advancing and instantiating two different models of competitive federalism.  The first model was developed by the economist Charles Tiebout in an article in the '50s entitled "A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures."  And this model depended on three assumptions.  The first assumption is that there's an infinite number of local jurisdictions providing public goods.  Obviously, an abstraction from reality, but useful.  The second assumption is that there is perfect mobility across all these jurisdictions.  Another idealization.  And the third assumption is that the levels and types of public goods are decided directly by voters in democratic elections, which is a stylization but serviceable.

So the way this works, assume that individuals are just randomly seated among different jurisdictions, and they have different preferences over levels and types of public goods provision.  Then voters vote on the levels and types of public goods to be provided in their local jurisdiction.  So you're going to end up with different mixes of public goods in different jurisdictions.  People then observe those mixes and move to the jurisdiction that best fits their preferences.

So as this process continues, ultimately you end up with a situation in which every individual lives in a jurisdiction with the ideal levels and types of public goods.

This is a striking result for economists because they have been unable to come up with any other mechanism that can lead to ideal public goods provision.  So Tiebout's model is a powerful argument for decentralization, for giving more power over public goods to local jurisdictions, and increasing the number of jurisdictions and people's ability to cross borders.

Another implication of this model is that federalism is for everyone.  It's not just for righties or lefties or libertarians or populists.  Everyone can benefit.  If you have an ideal model of public goods provision, you can benefit from being able to move to a jurisdiction that provides it.

In fact, in some countries, federalism is actually an issue of the left--France, Britain, Spain, for example.  Those are countries where federalism tends to be associated with the left, unlike in the U.S. where it's more an issue for the right.

Of course, in the real world, mobility is limited and there aren't an infinite number of jurisdictions.  So there isn't really this Tiebout-type effect, this sorting effect.  Only to a smaller degree.  So for small-government types, this presents us with a coordination dilemma.  The coordination dilemma results from the fact that we're a small minority spread throughout the United States among many jurisdictions.

Now, if we all decided just on individual judgment to move to the jurisdiction that we thought provided the best mix of public goods, then we'd still be a small minority in all those various states that we individually decide to move to.  But if we could coordinate on moving to a single state, then we would have sufficient voter and activist concentrations to swing the state's policy in a significantly pro-freedom direction.

A coordination dilemma happens when it doesn't matter so much what you do as that everyone involved is doing the same thing.  So a good example of this would be when you're deciding to go to dinner or the theater with someone else.  If you both go to dinner or you both go to the theater, that's fine.  It's bad if one of you goes to dinner and one of you goes to the theater, so you just need to coordinate on the same action.

In the same way, it doesn't so much matter where pro-freedom Americans move as that they all move to the same jurisdiction.  And that's the reason we decided to actually sign up people who are willing to move to solve the coordination dilemma by developing a focal point--New Hampshire--and by assuring everyone who participates that there are others who are going to be participating with them and undertaking the move.

To solve a coordination dilemma, you don't need strong, legally binding contracts the way you do to solve other kinds of problems, like prisoners' dilemma type problems.  You just need to develop a focal point through methods that are recognized as legitimate.  So we developed a focal point through a member vote, and our statement of intent is not a legally binding contract.  It's just that--a statement of intent.

Now, all that having been said, I think New Hampshire is by far the best choice for the Free State Project.  In socioeconomic terms, New Hampshire is the ideal place for a libertarian-type movement to succeed.  It is a fairly wealthy state, and it pays much more in taxes to the Federal Government than it receives back in expenditures. And my own research in political science has shown that in Europe and North America, these regions that lose out in the fiscal game tend to vote disproportionately for  (?)  parties and even parties that favor greater autonomy, or even independence in some cases, for the region.

New Hampshire doesn't have large metropolitan areas, which tend to be left-leaning.  New Hampshire is highly integrated into the international economy, and its economy is high-tech and knowledge-based.  Because of its religious mix, New Hampshire doesn't have a great number of social conservatives.  Researchers that try to quantify social tolerance among the different states usually find that New Hampshire is near the top of the heap.

So we couldn't have chosen a state on the Pacific coast or the Washington to Boston corridor or a Rust Belt state.  Those states are too urbanized and, therefore, too left-leaning.  Also, we couldn't have chosen a state in the rural West or Midwest, I don't think.  Those states tend to have weak economies.  They are dependent on the Federal Government for spending.  Their economies are natural resource-based, and they're not integrated into the international economy.

All those factors tend to make conservatives in those states a little more isolationist or even have something of a bunker mentality.  The South is too dependent on the Federal Government and is too socially conservative.  So New Hampshire ends up being the only state in the country with just the right mix.

All this brings me to the second model of competitive federalism I'd like to address, and this is Barry Weingast's market-preserving federalism.  When jurisdictions have primary regulatory responsibility over their economies and capital and labor can move across borders freely, then taxpayers and businesses will punish those governments that impose inefficient taxes and regulations by moving to other jurisdictions.  So to forestall this threat, governments in a market-preserving federalist state will tend to keep taxes and regulations low at the efficient level.

So the Tiebout-type model says that government will do what it should when you have jurisdictional competition, and the market-preserving federalism model says that government won't do what it shouldn't when you have jurisdictional competition.

The Free State Project is related to market-preserving federalism in two different ways.  First, New Hampshire is poised to benefit if the United States returns to a true model of market-preserving federalism.  One example is Social Security.  New Hampshire could do much better if it were taking care of its own Social Security program because its residents pay much more in Social Security taxes than they receive back in benefits.

So I would encourage policy institutes like AEI to start developing practical proposals to devolve powers to the states in major programs like Social Security.  And for our part, the Free State Project will be creating the grass-roots political pressure that makes these proposals salient and worthwhile.

The Free State Project can also contribute to market-preserving federalism and its beneficial workings in another way.  Once New Hampshire moves dramatically in a free market direction, we are going to continue to attract individuals and businesses from other states.  And other states are going to have to reform their own laws in order to avoid losing their tax base to our state.

So the Free State Project, in more ways than one, I think, is the thin end of the wedge in increasing liberty throughout the United States.

That's all for me.

MR. GREVE:  Jason, thank you very much.  I do have some questions, but I will hold back.

Michael?

MR. BARONE:  Well, thank you very much.  I confess that until I was asked to address this group, I had not heard of the Free State Project.  And having investigated it somewhat, I find it is--I guess the word I would say that's best to describe it is "charming."

[Laughter.]

MR. BARONE:  In fact, I think the--it is interesting.  I mean, the Free State Project is a project by people who take libertarianism seriously.  It seems to me that it is a sort of more communal and perhaps even would-be coercive form of trying to do things that have, in fact, been happening to a considerable extent anyhow over the past 40 years.  And if it succeeds in moving things further than they would have been moved otherwise by the natural forces that Jason's models describe, that's fine with me.

I have been studying demography, political election results, and things of this nature fairly closely since the late 1950s and have been keeping up with it over time, and the New Hampshire phenomenon is an interesting one to me.

In 1960, New Hampshire was a lot like Vermont.  In partisan terms, it was about five points more Democratic or less Republican.  Vermont was more Republican than New Hampshire, of course.  Vermont voted for Alf Landon in 1936.  And New Hampshire, with the industrial town of Manchester and those French-Canadian/American textile workers voted for Franklin Roosevelt.  The editor of the--the owner of the Manchester Union Leader at one point earlier had been Frank Knox, who was the Republican candidate for Vice President in 1936, predecessor of William Lowe, whose father was Theodore Roosevelt's chief staffer.  But, anyhow, I'm giving too much trivia here.

New Hampshire was not much bigger than Vermont either.  In the 1960 census, I think New Hampshire was 606,000 people.  That was the census that I memorized the best.  And Vermont was about 389,000.

What's happened since is that the two states have diverged economically and politically.  New Hampshire is now about 1.3 million more than--double what it was in 1960.  Vermont is up in the 600,000's, not as fast growth but significant growth.  And they've pursued very different kinds of public policy, and they have attracted different kinds of people.

If you drive through Vermont, you will notice that everything looks sort of manicured.  They've got these sort of state land-use controls and things.  No libertarian stuff for us.  It must be something that Howard Dean's friends think is aesthetically pleasing.

New Hampshire, on the other hand, for all its prosperity, looks junky.  There are all these 1980s and '90s commercial buildings that are put up any old which way.  They will probably not last forever and are not intended to last forever.  They're intended to make a profit for a while.  Then you put something else up.

Vermont has attracted culturally left-wing people.  New Hampshire has attracted economically right-wing people.  And New Hampshire has consistently over those four decades of inter-census periods that I'm talking about grown more than the national average and has been in most cases the only state in the Northeast that has grown more than the national average.  Some of this is overflow from Massachusetts or people that are living there.  Lots of airline pilots live in New Hampshire.  Even if you're flying the route from Denver to San Francisco, you live in New Hampshire because you don't pay any taxes.  You can deadhead to your flight.  Ask a pilot next time.  Ask ten pilots and see how many live in New Hampshire.  In fact, Gordon Humphrey, who was an airline pilot living in New Hampshire, got elected to the United States Senate.

Politically, New Hampshire is the Republican state and the most libertarian, I suppose you could say, in the Northeast.  And for a while, at least, it exerted a real force on national politics.  Jason Sorens wants to use 20,000 Free Staters to leverage New Hampshire, to leverage the world.  That's already been done once, and if you can do it again, fine.  I mean 1980s, the New Hampshire primary.  On election night November 1988, George H.W. Bush's first words were "Thank you, New Hampshire."  He had beaten Bob Dole in the New Hampshire primary on the tax issue, and New Hampshire was famously taxophobic.  In the general election, he got 62 percent of the vote in New Hampshire.

Now, the bad news--and perhaps it's bad news for the Free State Project, or may be someday--is that in the 1990s, New Hampshire was inundated by statists, or at least its libertarian--another way to put, its libertarian instincts took it in another direction.  It voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 by pluralities.  But that's a huge difference from the George H.W. Bush vote.  One reason, I think, is that if you look at the--one reason for the collapse of the Bush vote is that if you look at the decline--where were the two areas in the country where Bush's percentage went down most between 1988 and '92?  Answer:  Southern California and New Hampshire.

Question two:  Where were the two areas in the country where housing prices went down the most between 1988 and 1992?  Answer:  Southern California and New Hampshire.  People lost wealth, and they rebelled against Bush.  Also, their perhaps libertarian instincts on cultural issues moved them towards the Democrats.  And here I'd disagree with Jason Sorens.  He says New Hampshire has no large metropolitan areas.  It has no large central cities.  Manchester, its largest city, is a Republican stronghold.  Although they register Democratic, they vote Republican.

But New Hampshire is basically part of a large metro area.  I mean the Boston CMSA, or whatever the census calls it, is over half the State.  And like many of the largest metro areas in the country, they trended towards Clinton-Gore Democrats on the cultural issues in the period 1992 to 2000.  Whether that trend will continue this year, I'm not sure, or whether they'll snap back and vote more Republican.  I can find polling evidence for both propositions of the course of the last couple months in New Hampshire, so I don't know the answer to that question.

But in any case, it does seem to me that New Hampshire has provided important leverage.  You know, if you look at the Reagan-Thatcher revolution and everything, the 1.2 million people in New Hampshire actually played a fairly significant part, and I think that it is still pretty fertile ground for that sort of behavior.  And people do indeed vote with their feet.  In 1960, New Hampshire had a population that was less than one-tenth of that of Massachusetts--or about one-tenth.  Now it's about one-fifth of Massachusetts.  So, you know, there is movement in this direction.  I would anticipate that it would continue.

There was a movement towards trying to change New Hampshire's very basic public policy of no state income or sales tax, no broad-based tax, in the 1990s.  This movement was led, interestingly, by the courts.  The New Hampshire Supreme Court found in some vague language, preamble-type language in the New Hampshire Constitution, a responsibility for the state to finance education rather than having localities do it, which New Hampshire almost uniquely among the states does.  This sort of crackpot jurisprudence pushed them towards a broad-based tax.  Governor Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat elected in '96, '98, and '00, ended up trying to get such a tax.  Ultimately that project failed, and Craig Benson, a Republican, was elected Governor in 2002 over a Democrat who was in favor of a state income tax and who wrote up all these reasons why New Hampshire now really wanted an income tax.  I think he got 29 percent of the vote.

[Laughter.]

MR. BARONE:  As I understand the legal situation now in New Hampshire, the court issued an order in December '02 saying that it was going to revisit this school financing issue again, but Governor Benson appointed a new member, and they don't have five votes out of nine for their Claremont decision anymore.  So the Governor and the legislature are simply ignoring the court, confident that if the case ever comes up again, their side is going to win and the old side is going to lose.  This is perhaps the best way to treat these courts.

Anyhow, good luck to you.  I do sense a note of coerciveness in your project, and certainly a form of communalism which reminds me of Brigham Young and the Mormons.

[Laughter.]

MR. BARONE:  And like Brigham Young, you may have to give up one of your biggest tenets in order to get the political power you want.  But good luck to you.

MR. GREVE:  Jason, you'll have a chance to respond to that assault.

[Laughter.]

MR. GREVE:  I just have just one quick question for Michael.  The influx into New Hampshire, where did it come from?  And I don't mean--you probably know the answer by zip code.  I don't want it to that level of detail.  But is it mostly sort of spillover from Boston?  Or is it from far-flung areas so that people across the country say, hey, what about New Hampshire?

MR. BARONE:  I think the answer is both.  Certainly it's some taxophobic people adding another ten miles to their commute.  But at this point, you know, you've got a real economic base.  I mean, Jason is right.  You know, if you go to Wyoming, what's the economic base there?  Well, they've got a lot of coal fields where machines scoop coal out and put it into these five-mile-long trains that go to Midwest power plants.  That's sort of the economy of Wyoming.  The only place you can fly to is Jackson Hole because there are so many rich people there that they generate enough air traffic.

New Hampshire, on the other hand, Manchester has got a terrific airport, probably built by statist means.  And they've got heating coils in the runways so that it melts the snow.  New Hampshire is great at snow removal.  It's really terrific.  Local government, I'm sure.

So it's from all over, and, you know, they've generated huge amounts of--you know, some of it is Massachusetts.  I mean, George W. Bush spoke after the primary at a Fidelity facility in Merrimac.  I've been there.  You drive off this U.S. 3 onto this little sort of dirt road, and you're in the woods.  You know, you're saying, Have I got the wrong street?  You know, you look at the map.  And suddenly there's this huge sort of turquoise huge building, campus building and stuff, and they've got something like 5,000 people that work there or something.  They manage $1.3 trillion worth of funds and stuff.

And why do they do this?  Well, as the Governor pointed out to me, they have a lot of computer equipment and there's no sales tax in New Hampshire.  It's a lot cheaper up there.  And it's brought businesses in from all over the country, like the pilots parachute in.

MR. GREVE:  Thank you, Michael.

Richard?

MR. VEDDER:  Actually, you mentioned the pilots.  I just realized the two times I've been invited to speak in Concord to members of the legislature, I was invited by pilots in both cases, who wrote me my honorarium check out by themselves, you know, no organization.  In fact, one of them handed me cash, you know.

[Laughter.]

[Inaudible comment.]

MR. VEDDER:  Let's not go down that line, Dan.  So I find that quite amusing.

I'm actually an economic historian by training, and I suspect that some of my professional colleagues amongst the economic historians would look on this project with some disdain, noting historical failures in the past of sort of ideologically driven groups seeking a better life through migration.  For example, they might mention in the 19th century the Scottish industrialist and socialist Robert Owen founded a utopian community, New Harmony, Indiana, which turned out to be a colossal failure.

But I would also argue that the Free State Project is quite a different kind of idea, not based on trying to build an economy from scratch from flawed ideological foundations.  And I would also note in mentioning the Mormons that group migrations have often indeed been very successful in changing the political and cultural environment--the Mormons; the Jewish migration to Israel I suppose is the biggest of all.

But I do think, if I can put on for a minute or two an amateur Michael Greve/Michael Barone hat for just a second, ask a more reasonable argument questioning the project would go something like this--and, incidentally, I'm 100 percent behind the project, but if you wanted to question the soundness of the project, how would you do it?

Can 20,000 people--or even let's double that--40,000 people moving to a state in five years change the balance of power in any real fashion?  Public choice types like to use something called a median voter model, often, and they might argue something like this:

Suppose 40 percent of the citizens of New Hampshire are what we might call conservatives or libertarians, 35 percent are moderates, and 25 percent are liberals.  Now, at the moment conservatives and libertarians need some moderate support in order to control the government, and occasionally a Jeanne Shaheen, a moderate liberal coalition will govern, although given the fact that conservatives and libertarians outnumber the liberals, that is the exception rather than the rule.

Now, suppose just for the sake of argument 30,000 libertarians move into New Hampshire over five years.  That inflow is less than what in your packet the enclosed Census Bureau handout suggests is normal in migration over a five-year period.  The Free State Project migrants will even be a minority among the new immigrants to the State.  At most, it would change the political orientation of the total population by about four percentage points.

The conservative/libertarian group in this little example would go from 40 to 44, the moderates maybe to 32, and the liberals to 22.  It will still take some moderate support to control government and policies.

The move might have great symbolic importance, but perhaps less in terms of real political impact within the State of New Hampshire.

Now, to be sure, maybe I got the numbers wrong.  What if the mix is 48 percent conservative/libertarian and 30 percent moderate and 22 percent liberal?  The in-migration can make a real difference, providing the margin of support to allow libertarians and conservatives to rule.  Or if the project draws far more participants than anticipated, you could get the same outcome.

So the success of the project in a very narrow and practical political sense depends on the magnitude of the migration as well as the current balance of power politically in New Hampshire.  Politics, as Michael Barone knows better than any human being, are determined at the margin.  The margin is pretty small.

For example, in 2000, Nader won 22,000 votes in New Hampshire.  In his absence from the ticket, it is very likely Al Gore would have won the state.  Bush's victory margin was a little over 7,000 votes.  That suggests that at the margin, the Free State Project could have a significant impact on New Hampshire.

Now, that's enough of my amateur political speculation.  That's not my field of expertise.  But I'm a college professor with tenure so I talk about anything I want.

[Laughter.]

MR. VEDDER:  Let me turn to something I know a little more about, namely, the American experience regarding migration and the role of government.

Do Americans consider the role of government in making their migration decisions?  Is Tiebout making an important point, or Barry Weingast, for that matter, in their arguments about people moving to provide the level of government services, or the tax competition kind of arguments, are they valid?  And the answer to these questions is clearly yes.

I first probably should make a general observation, putting my economic historian hat on, about the magnitude of American migration.  Since at least 1850, when the first good relevant census data became available, at any moment in time at least one-third of the American population is living in a different state or country than the one in which they were born.  There are a few exceptions over small parts of that 150-year period, but as a generalization, this is true.  And, of course, if you include intrastate migration, the proportion grows larger.

In a book I once wrote, I loved a quote from an observer in the mid-19th century who said, "Every day is moving day in the United States of America."  This is the essence of the American experience.

And even if you confine your analysis to a single year, to a 12-month period, in any given single year more than 15 percent of the American population move during that year.  There is a handout from the Census Bureau in your packet.  The annual migration rate is particularly great among younger people.  It's over 20 percent among those under the age of 35.  It declines sharply as the age rises.  Older people have a harder time breaking from their locales.

Now, in making migration decisions, as Michael G.--I guess we have Michael G. and Michael B.--M.G. indicated, people consider many things, obviously.  You know, the research on migration suggests that anticipated income after moving, probability of future earnings growth, proximity of friends and relatives, particularly important among immigrants, levels of pollution, climate--all these things are important, including the quantity and quality of governmental services and the cost of those services.

Is the cost of government important, though, amongst that whole list of factors?  Do people in general favor areas with low taxes and presumably less extensive governmental services?  Or do they favor areas where taxes and services are at a high level, in general?

Here the evidence is absolutely overwhelming.  Taxes seem to matter a great deal in migration decisions and, without question, Americans in the aggregate in general prefer low-tax states, areas that come closest to conforming with the libertarian ideals held by the supporters of the Free State Project and very much consistent with the earlier comments about this is going on already.

I did a little analysis of the census data yesterday in anticipate of this, from actually one of the tables in your packet.  For example, just to take New Hampshire as an example, from April 1st of 2000 to July 1st of last year, a period a little over three years, New Hampshire had a natural population increase of about 15,000, births exceeding deaths.  And it also had an in-migration of about 7,500 immigrants from abroad.  But it had an in-migration of almost 30,000 native-born Americans in that three-year period, about 10,000 a year flowing in.  And, incidentally, that is very close to the experience of the 1990s.

So all told, in that three-year period the population of New Hampshire went up by 52,000, and more than 70 percent of that growth came from migration.  So it is already a state that is migration driven in its population growth, very consistent to Michael Barone's point earlier.

Then what I did is I said let's look at tax burdens, and look not just at New Hampshire.  Let's look at all the states.  And so I took the average state and local tax burden for the 50 states for the year 2001, the middle of this three-year period, using data from the Tax Foundation, which is based on Census Bureau data.  I took the ten states with the highest average tax burden, and I compared it with the data for the states with the ten lowest tax burdens.

Now, the high-tax-burden states literally stretch--literally--from Maine to Hawaii, and included such big states as California, of course, and New York.  The ten lowest-tax states literally stretched from Alaska to Florida, including such big states as Texas and Florida.

So what was the migration behavior with respect to these two different groups of states?  During the three-year period, a net total of 819,110 people, native-born Americans--I've got a statistic Michael Barone has never known before.  819,110 native-born Americans moved out of the high-tax states, going to other lower-tax jurisdictions.  But an even larger number, 871,655, moved into the ten lowest-tax states.

Then if you add another 940,751 immigrants, the low-tax states had a net in-migration in this three-year period of 1,812,406.

Now this isn't, you know, some right-wing group saying this.  This is the Census Bureau.  And that's an in-migration of over 1,500 people a day, every day and night, holidays included, for over three years.  It's one of the greatest migrations in human history taking place as Americans are moving to low-tax havens that come closest to embodying the ideals of the Free State Project.  And not a word about it appeared in the New York Times or the Washington Post.

Now, you might argue that these simple statistical comparisons I do are inappropriate, we need to correct for other non-tax factors impacting on migration, blah, blah, blah.  That's true.  You need to do econometric analysis.  I've done the econometric analysis.  The findings are almost identical to what you get making these simple comparison.  On balance, Americans tend to move away from big government, the larger versions of the welfare.  So what the Free State Project is doing is very American.  It indeed--it's a more explicit and organized effort to do what Americans are already doing.

Now, in the absence of migration, I think the American federal system would be a far less interesting and important experiment in representative democracy.  It's the very essence of a personal liberty.  We all know that.  I don't need to deal in this.

Jason speaks of secession, his interest is in secession.  Libertarian philosophers often talk about the right of secession of governmental units.  But migration gives every individual the right to secede from governments that are found oppressive, and people are doing this.

One byproduct of all of this migration is that it does--and this picks up on Weingast--spur greater interstate tax competition, a topic that our friend Van Mitchell here and I spend many hours yelling and screaming at the Europeans about.

One phenomenon of the interest is that the interstate tax differentials in the United States have narrowed considerably over time.  Why?  I suspect that the answer is that the threat of migration and the reality of migration of both people and capital has forced many high-tax states like New York, although not California--which is why California is just a basket case--forced may high-tax states like New York to moderate the burden or face severe economic consequences.

In the last ten years, the tax burden of the ten highest-tax states has actually fallen rather noticeably as the out-migration of human and physical capital reached such proportions that these states were forced to reduce the relative size of government.  And I think individuals like, if I may use New York, George Pataki, who sensed this problem, have won out politically over people like Mario Cuomo, who did not.  To use a more recent example, Gray Davis would never have been replaced by the Terminator if the tax burden had been low in California and government had been lean and mean.

So I rejoice in the existence of the project.  I think it's a good idea.  It attempts to extend and capitalize on an impulse that Americans already have.  Americans are a society where they like to keep most of the fruits of their labor and find that they can grow and prosper more as a consequence.

MR. GREVE:  Thank you very much, Richard.

And now, Alan Bock, who will explain to us why the Free State Project should take back Orange County rather than New Jersey--sorry, New Hampshire.

MR. BOCK:  Well, it is a little--Richard talked about corrections in California, and we're still in the process of seeing how all those corrections are going to work out.  But it was not just the fact that Gray Davis had the most appropriate name of almost anybody I can think of, and that in the first few months of his tenure in office when I would call Sacramento, I would get more complaints from Democratic staffers than from Republican staffers as to how distant and cold and unwilling to communicate with his political allies he was.  But it was also the high levels of taxation and regulation.  We have had--when my colleague Steve Greenhut (ph) from the Register spent a couple of weeks in Sacramento, he had several Democratic assemblymen say, "Well, you know, the climate is good.  You know, businesses simply have to stay here."

[Laughter.]

MR. BOCK:  "And we can tax and regulate them as much as we want."

Well, they're finding that it doesn't work that way.  And, you know, whether--how many are going to end up in New Hampshire, I don't know.  But even in California, there's some hope of correction.

I wanted to talk a little bit, because I've been a fairly self-conscious libertarian for a long time, about some of the other schemes that libertarians have put together over--at least in recent history, and the more I know about the Free State Project, it doesn't seem like a utopian scheme.  But it has some elements there, and there's some history behind this.  And maybe some of this history can be useful as people do the Free State Project--not necessarily utopian schemes exactly, but efforts to establish communities of like-minded people who share values and who, therefore, might be able to get along better with one another -- [tape ends].

-- great essay, "Intellectuals in Socialism," which included what I thought was the greatest--one of the greatest definitions defining intellectuals as secondhand dealers in ideas, advocated that advocates of a free society be explicitly utopian in at least some of their advocacy because modern American and European intellectuals are attracted to utopias, and that sets out some sort of an ideal.

Among the heavyweights of the libertarian tradition, Henry Haslett (ph) wrote a book that was essentially a constitution, you know, revising the U.S. Constitution, more explicit guarantees of private property rights, more explicit limitations on the powers of government, you know, tried to sort of correct--not necessarily correct but in light of experiences to how expansively various courts and legislatures have interpreted the U.S. Constitution to try and see if it couldn't be firmed up.

But among those in recent history, there's a fellow named Mike Oliver who was a land developer in Carson City, Nevada, and in about '67 or '68 he wrote a book called "A Constitution for a New Country."  And for about the next 15 years, he fairly actively tried to start a new country that would attract libertarians, people who wanted to live free.  And in the '70s, there were actually some efforts made in that direction.

The first one was a reef a couple of hundred miles from Tonga in the South Pacific, and it was actually underwater part of the day, but only a little bit underwater.

[Laughter.]

MR. BOCK:  At low tide, you could actually do something, and they thought they could--you know, they could
build things that would withstand the ocean, and so they have something above the sea.  So they planted a flag and called the new nation Minerva, and went to the UN and registered it.  But the King of Tonga sent his war canoes out, and the handful of libertarians who thought they were going to establish this free state in the South Pacific were not prepared to deal with that.  So that project died.

Another one that happened a little bit--let me put a little bit of context in this.  Most of these projects happened in the early '70s, and this was a time when we had the Vietnam War going on, we had a Republican President imposing wage and price controls, we had Watergate coming on, and there were a lot of people who were sort of looking and concluding that maybe the United States is irredeemable, maybe the corruption in the United States is going to be so deep-rooted and deep-seated that we have to go elsewhere if we want to live in freedom, and kind of a fringe group of people that were fairly actively involved in it, but you can see some of the sentiment behind it, and why at least there were people who were willing to put some time and effort into it.

The next one that was most active was an island called Abaco in the Bahamas.  This was around '74, '75, and it was the time when the Bahamas become independent from Great Britain.  There were several islands in the Bahamas that looked at the new government in Nassau, and particularly those that were mostly white or [inaudible] heritage and said, you know, we're going to have a black power government in Nassau.  Maybe we ought to declare independence from that government.  Abaco was one of those islands.  Mike Oliver and several other libertarians sensed an opportunity here, started going down to Abaco, giving speeches.  People like John Hosper [ph], Susan Love Brown, Bob Poole of the Reason Foundation took a trip down there, and that one never really came to being because the inhabitants of Abaco, while somewhat sympathetic to the idea, decided finally that secession was not what they wanted to do, and there weren't enough outside agitators to make it happen.

The next project was in the New Hebrides in the South Pacific, an island called Vanuatu, and what was the guy's name?  Anyway, the chief of the tribe was--wait a second, I got his name.  Well, he did spend several years in jail after that.

[Laughter.]

MR. BOCK:  Anyway, dynamic character, and I'll find his name sometime.  And this island of Vanautu wanted to declare independence from the New Hebrides.  They had a resistance movement that went on for several years, and again, a bunch of libertarians sort of sensed an opportunity, even Dana Rohrbacher, who's a Congressman from Orange County now, and was more explicitly libertarian in the 1970s than I think he is now, took a couple of trips there; Jack Wheeler took several trips.  But eventually that rebellion was crushed by the British.

So trying to establish a new country overseas apparently had not been a very successful thing, and that is why I think the Free State Project has at least more promise than some of these previous efforts.

I guess I have a couple of questions that I would just like to throw out as we got to the discussion and questions.  It seems to me even though there is some natural migration into New Hampshire, when outsiders come in, and particularly outsiders with an explicit political agenda, I wonder what kind of resistance they are going to meet from the natives or the people who have been there longer.  Are libertarians, who are not always the most congenial people in the world, going to alienate people rather than persuade them?  That's hard to figure out.  So are you going to alienate the locals or are you going to bring them over and make them--

On the other hand, you know, it's sort of a cliche and a cliche because it's mostly true, that it's small groups of dedicated people who make most of the big social changes throughout history.  So in terms of raw numbers, in terms of raw numbers of a voting block, if there's only 20,000 or 30,000, that might not have a huge significant impact on New Hampshire, but if you've got a number of these people who are reasonably savvy activists, they could make a much larger impact than the raw numbers would indicate.

Now, on the other hand besides that, how savvy are the activists going to be?  Newcomers usually don't immediately move into positions of influence and power for any number of reasons.  Are you going to have professional people who can, for example, begin to populate the state highway department, the transportation department, people with professional qualifications and libertarian orientation?  There are such people.  Are they all going to move to New Hampshire?  And the obvious questions:  how many people are actually going to do it?  How are they going to make a living if they do move there?

But on the other hand, you know, let there be two, three, many ways to try to spread liberty in the world.  This is an inherently intriguing project, I would have to say.  Michael said it's charming.  I think it's intriguing as well, and it's sort of the basic of entrepreneurial theory that the successful entrepreneur creates something that you didn't know you wanted before you had it, before it was available.  This may be that kind of a project that could have that kind of an influence because it's innovative and has a certain charm to it.

So I go ahead.  Any way to spread freedom, as far as I am concerned, is a good thing. Any way to get more people talking about freedom, thinking about freedom, thinking about federalism and the liberty of American people to migrate and choose the way they're going to live, I think is a healthy thing.  So, go to it, Jason.

MR. GREVE:  Thank you, Alan.

Here's how I suggest we proceed.  I'm going to give Jason a chance to discuss the various comments that have been made, and then we'll have a rip-roaring discussion.

Before you go, I have one additional question, and it's something I'd like you to talk a little bit about, and that is the social profile of your membership?  That is to say, what do we actually, or what do you know about them, whether you've had any polls?  I have two things in particular in mind.  One is the income and age distribution.  The reason why I'm asking is that one of the reasons why there is so little intra-European migration, why everybody comes from outside, is that the distribution here--I mean migration has this weird hourglass distribution, that is to say, wealthy people with lots of mobile assets, mostly education, move.  Very poor people move, mostly from countries outside the European Union into the European Union.  Inside the European Union people are so locked into their existing welfare(?) state arrangements that they simply can't move.

So what that suggests to me is hypothesis.  Most of the people we're talking about here have relatively little attachments, and are economically rather independent, and maybe depending on the age, already fairly well off, which makes them attractive to the prospective host state.

And the other question is, I mean about the demographics still, is something that relates to what Alan talked about, which is are you really looking for libertarians who in real life act like socialists?  Namely, they go to meetings.  They participate, right?  But speaking for myself, you know, I'm proud never to have participated in any political activity of any kind ever in my life, so count me out if that's the prospect.  But if that's true, so if, for example, in the Free State Project itself, you have a disproportionately large number of people who are already, let's say, journalists or activists, people who know how to do stuff, right, that would have sort of a snowball effect as we discussed.

So if you could just talk a little bit about that, and respond to everybody else?

MR. SORENS:  Sure.  I'll start out first on the demographics because we did do a member survey along with a vote that we had last year, and we found something of an hourglass distribution, but for a different reason I think.

Most of our members tend to be young, 18 to 35, and there's a small blip at the end, over 65, probably retirees who are a little more mobile.  Income and education tended to be well above the American average, but there also tended to be a blip at the low end on income, which I think represents college students, because we have a number of college students.

Demographically, we asked a little bit about how many people are moving with you?  We have a large number of single people, and those single people tend to be overwhelmingly male.  That's probably true of many libertarian-type organizations.

[Laughter.]

MR. SORENS:  We also have a good proportion of married people, I think about 40 percent was what we found, but very few married with children, about 10 or 15 percent.  So that is probably the weak demographic for us, which we'll try to work on in the future I think, because those people are likely, once they move, to settle down roots there, and be active in the community.

As far as occupations, we did a survey of that, but we weren't thinking of focusing on who is going to be an activist.  The assumption was everyone is going to be some kind of activist, like socialists, like the leftists who move into Vermont, you know, they're going to serve on the local boards and bureaucracies and not complain about it, which is unusual for libertarians, but we're hoping that given the nature of this opportunity, that people will hold their nose and do what they need to do.

So I can't really give in advance any hard figures on how many are journalists or former politicians or former bureaucrats, people with those qualifications.

Of course, I do know that our membership is well educated, most with a bachelor's degree or an advanced graduate degree.

With regard to some of the comments made, I actually don't have too many responses.  First, the argument to communalism.  I certainly hope that the Free State Project isn't communalist in itself.  We have a small minority of people who are interested in things like co-housing or taking over a town or things like that, but my hope is the vast majority--and I think this is the case--are just going to settle into ordinary neighborhoods, be ordinary people, leaven the loaf, so to speak, around the State, and that way it's not really communalist.  It's really just, you know, we've identified a state.  Now for decades in the future I think, probably libertarians who think about moving somewhere for lifestyle reasons will think first of New Hampshire, and over time that will increase the libertarian concentration in the state.

Another point I'd like to make on that is that it is a cooperative effort.  We're not just relying on natural migration patterns.  Otherwise, there wouldn't be a need for Free State Project, and we are signing up people.  In that sense, maybe it's--I wouldn't use the word "coercive" because of the moral implications of that, but it is a cooperative effort.

Why do we need a cooperative effort?  Why can't we just rely on this massive migration from high-tech states to low-tech states?  And I think the reason has to do with the fact that libertarians tend to be--again, a small minority that's fairly, reasonably ideologically distant from the majority in the country, and leveraging to the extent of getting George H.W. Bush over Bob Dole, is probably only a small level of utility for most libertarians.  Getting a Ron Paul or a Craig Benson over a Bob Dole or a George H.W. Bush would be spectacular, and that's the type of thing that we'd be interested in doing in the long run.

With regard to the likely political implications, who much can 20,000 really do?  Well, as Alan noted, we are expecting people to be activists and not just voters.  How do we operationalize that?  What does that mean?  I think it means not just it will provide the margin of victory in some cases, but to want to also change the preferences of much of the population.  That sounds like a big task.  How do you change people's ideological preferences?  But I think if you're a public choice economist, you know that rational ignorance abounds, and you know that most people support policies that hurt them.  That's the reason we have such big inefficient government today.

Why do most people tend to oppose free trade and think that protectionism creates jobs?  They're hurting themselves by voting for those types of policies.  But they are ignorant of the actual truth behind the matter.  So the idea here would be to increase the saturation of ideas within New Hampshire, to make the more or less sophisticated argument for free market policies accessible to the population, and we haven't been able to do that throughout the country as a whole because we're drowned out by all the other messages that are coming from all other corners of the spectrum.  I'm hoping in New Hampshire that our message will come through crystal clear.

Let's see.  Further comments.  Will we actually get 20,000 people?  To me, that is actually the biggest hurdle.  I think if we get 20,000 people to move, then the political effects are going to be significant in the long run.  The biggest hurdles is going to be getting those 20,000 people, especially given the fact that they're going to have to find jobs and homes and things like that.  We tried to set this up in such a way that it would be easy for people to do that, so we're not requiring a moral requirement, but we're not asking people to move until we get 20,000 signatures.  Some people are moving already.  I would say about 20 have moved so far that I know of.

So there's a long period of time in which you can move, before we reach 20,000, and then there's a five-year period in which we ask people to move after that.  So effectively, we're looking at a long-run horizon of 2011, and we're hoping that people are going to be able to fit that in somehow.  It certainly seems that you can within a seven-year period find a job in a home in the state that you want to live in.

Of course, there are other people moving into New Hampshire.  New Hampshire is drawing lots of people from Massachusetts and other places who are for free market ideas for the most part.  At least they like low taxes.  But are they going to be politically modern?  Are they going to dilute our influence?  Well, I think there are two ways of looking at that.  One is, of course, that they are tax refugees for the most part.  They're going to support our ideas to some extent.  The second is that we'll probably crowd out some of those people who would otherwise come in.  The new job opportunities will be taken by Free Staters instead of Bay States necessarily.

[Laughter.]

MR. SORENS:  So there's going to a reduction I think in the non-Free State migration.  It's hard to qualify exactly what that is going to be.

I think there was another question that Alan had that I haven't addressed yet.  Was there one?  I remember you had two questions.

MR. GREVE:  What's that chief's name?

[Laughter.]

MR. SORENS:  Yes, the chief's name.  I don't know.  You left out the nation of Malqusedec [ph].  They tried to get part of Fiji to secede but that's not libertarian.

MR. BOCK:  There was another great effort I just want to mention.  In about the early 1970s in San Francisco, the Gay Liberation Front looked around California and saw that Alpine County had only about 400 residents, and they said, "Why don't we move all the gay people there?  We can take over."   Well, as it turned out, they didn't have to do that.  But what happened is, because somebody wrote that in a gay newspaper, a whole bunch of fundamentalist christians started moving into Alpine County.

[Laughter.]

MR. BOCK:  And by about 1980 tourists could buy, a joke, a license to shoot homosexuals.  And as far as I know, no gay person ever moved to Alpine County.

MR. SORENS:  That reminds me.  There is the friendliness of the New Hampshire citizen.

MR. BOCK:  Yeah.  Are you going to alienate people or persuade them?

MR. SORENS:  Open season on porcupines.  Yeah, I think we've done a good job so far.  We've alienated many newspaper editors, that's for sure.  The editor of the Concord Monitor, Portsmouth Herald, I think is the name of that paper, written critical editorials.  The union leader is pro Free States.  The Governor is pro Free State.  Most of the e-mails and letters we've gotten from New Hampshire residents have been strongly positive, along the lines of things like, you know, "If you mean what you say, if you're going to be good neighbors, then you're welcome.  If you're just going to bring your city ways," you know and--

[Laughter.]

MR. SORENS:  "Then you're not welcome."  And we assured them, you know, we don't have city ways, even though there are some cities.  I think we've done a pretty good job so far.  Obviously, there are a few people who signed up with the Free State project, who we're sure not to put them in press contact roles, but for the most part this seems like a good bunch of people, and we've got a good leadership team in place, and I think we've done a good job of making our case in New Hampshire.  Always a few things that could be better.

The key thing to stress is that we chose New Hampshire because we love what it stands for, we love what it already is.  We just want to reinforce that, and that's sort of the line that we've been taking.

One other point that I'd like to make with regard to the plausibility of can it happen, one of the reasons that Vermont and New Hampshire diverged so much was actually a partially-planned migration by a leftist to Vermont.  In the '60s there was a big communal movement, obviously, and a lot of people wanted to move to Vermont and form communes because at that time it was the lowest population state in the country, and they did.  There were many communes formed in Vermont in the last '60s.  There were organizations recruiting people.  One was called Movement to Open Vermont to Experimentation, that handed out flyers in New York City and Boston, places like that.  A lot of those people left Vermont when the communes broke up and the hippie era ended.  But some of them stayed, and you know, Bernie Sanders is from Brooklyn, one of these people who moved in in the early '70s, so they definitely had an effect on Vermont's political culture, changing it from a rock-red conservative state to this kind of crunchy granola cultural left-type state.  And in New Hampshire I think we would have an even bigger effect, considering it's already friendly to us.

I think that about completes my comments.

MR. GREVE:  Jason, thank you very much.  Kate has a microphone.  If you have a question, please raise your hand, and once you ask--we are taping this, aren't we?  Wonderful.  Would you in that case identify yourself by name and affiliation and then ask your question.

QUESTION:  I'm Jan Healthier [ph] with the Bottom Line.  I'd like to thank AEI for having this activity, this discussion on Free State Project.

When I hear charming aspersions, I become even more motivated to support the Free State Project, and I'd like to ask Mr. Barone to explain what he meant by "coercion."  He may have said it as a joke, and so I just want to make sure that he really doesn't mean it.  But if he does have something on his mind regarding why it's coercive, I'd like to hear that as well.

I think the question on whether this is a cult or not, I think there's a big difference between a cult, which is based on [inaudible] authoritarian faith conclusions, and rational commitment to freedom and individual rights.  I would like to live with people that have a rational commitment to individual rights and freedom.  I'd love to have them as my neighbors, and if that's a cult or a commune, call it that.  I'm fine with it.

I'd like to make one positive point, which is that if you're going to examine an option and you're going to criticize it and determine whether it's any good or not, the thing that you need to do is to compare it to the alternatives.  What do freedom-loving people have as other options to gain political power on the margin, albeit, but whatever it is, what other options do we have?  How has the Libertarian Party contributed to increasing the people power of the people that are committed to freedom and individual rights?

Well, that strategy certainly hasn't paid off.  So this strategy really offers more potential for political power for the people that are committed to freedom than any other strategy.  You can put X amount of money, time and resources into this strategy, and on the other side what you'll get is a lot more political power than if you implement any other strategy.  So I think that is the criteria that you should use to evaluate the relative intelligence or the sophistication or the greatness or the charmingness or the intriguingness of the Free State Project.  That's how I would evaluate it.  When I think about it, it's hands down a great idea.  That's why I support it.

MR. GREVE:  Michael.

MR. BARONE:  Well, you'll be dealing with United Van Lines within five years, I guess, which is one of the great organizations that keeps track of this.  You know, we find out from United Van Lines where people are moving to and where they have to get the vans back out of because everybody's leaving New York to go to New Hampshire, Florida, whatever.

Yeah, when I call people charming it means  I like them.

[Laughter.]

PARTICIPANT:  what about coercive?

MR. BARONE:  Coercive?  Well, I said it's sort of was redolent of coercion.  Jason uses the word "cooperative," "communal" or something like that.  That's all I meant.  There's a certain amount of coercion when you set up a group and when people organization into a group, and then you say, "Well, you are going to go along.  You've got a moral obligation to do this.  You are going to go along, aren't you?"  I mean, that's not like putting them in jail, but--

QUESTION:  It's like Public Television pledges, you've got to fulfill it.

I'm Mike McGauth [ph] from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.  I was going to ask Jason if--you were talking about some of the opposition you've had from editorial writers.  Do you see, once this, if it gains a critical mass, precipitating a sort of movement on the other side in the sense that you have a bidding war and you have labor unions putting ads in the New Republic or the Nation saying, "We need cadres of people to counter the Free Staters who are going to move up there?"  I'm not being completely facetious.  Has that occurred to you?

MR. SORENS:  Well, actually, it has, and I put myself in their shoes.  If I were a hard lefty, what would I want to do?  Would I want to move to god-forsaken New Hampshire, or would I want to move to Massachusetts or New York or California, places where I think things are going in the right direction?  I think this would have been a much more difficult project if we tried to get 20,000 libertarians to move to one of those states in hopes of minimizing their state of tendencies.  So I think that would require a really high level of commitment that I don't see that quite happening.

QUESTION:  Hi.  I'm Steven Jones.  I'm a Free Stater and a libertarian, and I've bene camping with my family in New Hampshire since childhood, and I love New Hampshire.

My question was, my understanding is New Hampshire has the most libertarians in elective office of any state.  Is that true, Jason?

MR. SORENS:  Yeah.  Last I heard that was true, and that's Libertarian Party members elected to local offices.  Don't have any in the state house right now; did have some in the state house earlier in the '90s.

New Hampshire has some great institutions too, which I didn't talk about, that really make it possible for a third party movement for Free Staters that want to go that way.  Some of us are going to be a Libertarian caucus within the Republicans, but for Free Staters who want to work with the LP, you have fusion voting which allows you to get the Libertarian nomination and the Republican nomination if you wanted to.  That really helps you, and you get those straight ticket Republican voters.  It also has a very large legislature, which means there are few voters per representative.  There are 400 people in the state house.  They haven't raised their $100 a year salaries since 1889, and so that makes it easy to keep your representatives under control, and it's easy for people to run a small grass roots campaign in a local area and get elected.  So all those things really spell promise to me.

QUESTION:  My name is Francis Bouchard.  I'm here primarily as a former native of New Hampshire, who has an abbreviated version of our creed "Live free or die" on my Virginia license plate.  I'm also a corporate lobbyist, and I'm intrigued by the global macroeconomic implications of what you're talking about here, particularly as we view the public policy struggle over outsourcing and globalization.  I think there are some direct analogies here.

My question though is going in the other direction.  New Hampshire, as you know, is very dependent on local taxation primarily through the property tax.  I wonder if you have taken your concept one level more in detail and identified jurisdictions within New Hampshire which reflect the Free State principles more than others, and whether you'll be directing people to move to Portsmouth instead of Manchester or my home town Kuntuca [ph].  Also, a similar vein, do you have a particular political agenda of issues you want to change in New Hampshire?  Do you want to repeal certain aspects?  Do you want to impose other changes on the political system?

MR. SORENS:  On that last point, I should emphasize that the Free State Project is nonpolitical.  We're going for tax-exempt status and so forth.  So we don't endorse candidates or legislation, and obviously, our members have some different views on different policies within an overall similar ideological framework.  So people will have different preferences or different priorities.

One interesting thing that's going through now, through the legislature, is a bill to legalize basically "Alaska carry" it's called among gun rights activists, conceal-carry without a license.  And that's a minor thing.  I'm not a gun owner myself, but it's something that shows that you respect your citizens, don't automatically suspect them of crimes, and I think that's a positive move that will help show that New Hampshire is a good place for libertarians.

Global macroeconomic conflict, that's very interesting because it's sort of what I study, most of the time where I'm coming from academically, scholastically.  I think that sub-state regions, likes states in the U.S., are becoming more and more important in the global economy for a variety of reasons.

First, nation-states are losing some of their importance as far as regulating international trade and international commerce, and so they are not really the focus necessarily of future political efforts.  Also, much of the success in the global economy depends on, especially for the most advanced countries like the U.S., on developing high value-added types of exports and products.  And that really depends on, often, developing some kind of local hook for business, and in Italy you see this, in Northern Italy with the industrial districts, little towns are devoted solely to producing high-quality furniture, shoes and whatever.  And you may see this also in New Hampshire with maybe software and things like that.   You see it in Silicon Valley, an industrial district in the U.S.

So I think in the future, we're going to need to have states have more flexibility to adapt to the global economy, and the state level is going to become much more important, and that's why the Free State Project I think will have a big effect.  Even right now state policies like utilities, taxes, health insurance mandates, all kinds of regulations for business, can be dealt with right at the state level.  We don't even have to press for more devolution in order to start changing some of those things.

QUESTION:  [Inaudible].

MR. SORENS:  Oh, yeah.  Well, we don't want to impose a single plan on everyone.  People can move wherever they want to in the state, but obviously there are some areas that are more attractive than others.  The most socialistic towns are probably the ones that it would be worthwhile avoiding.  You know, we could identify those as Portsmouth, Durham, Concord, Keene, Hanover, basically college towns and the capitol are the places where you probably want to not sink any good activists in there.

MR. GREVE:  Can I just ask one quick follow-up question, which will betray my utter ignorance of foreign countries, but since the global context has come up, I just want to ask a question about the cultural contradictions of libertarianism.  It seems to me that argument, the libertarian argument for mobility is very, very easy.  The hard question is, what are you going to do about it when you are there?  And this is the union question.

And Michael Barone will help me out.  What was that guy in Holland who was shot?

MR. BARONE:  Fortuin [ph].

MR. GREVE:  There you have it.  A very devoted libertarian, at least on some dimensions, but ferociously anti-immigration, and the reason is the union question.  If you want to preserve that environment, you not only have to work right for the local politics to develop in the libertarian direction, you also have to somehow prevent outsiders and the high-tolerant and the high taxes from chewing up your game.  And that means at some point--not that you could do it in the United States, but ideally you have to restrict immigration or something like that.  You see what I'm after?  It's a theoretical question.

MR. SORENS:  Right.  I mean one way to address it is a constitutional restriction, make the constitution very airtight so that it's--require a three-fourth majority to raise taxes, a 5/6 majority, things like that that will insulate yourself a little bit.  There's no easy answer.

MR. GREVE:  Well, New Hampshire seems to have had some population movement like that in the '90s, and you can't bar registered Democrats from moving in.

[Laughter.]

QUESTION:  It's worth noting that more people voted for Gore and Nader combined.  More people voted for Gore and Nader than Bush in 2000.  I mean that's just a fact.

PARTICIPANT:  Maybe they knew what Bush was going to do.

[Laughter.]

QUESTION:  My name is David Eagle.  First of all I want to say thank you, Jason, for starting the Free State Project.  Right now I'm serving as communications director for the Libertarian Party of Maryland.  I am an early adopter.  What that means is that I was the first person to move to New Hampshire.  Jason already alluded to it, that back in the '90s New Hampshire elected four state representatives and I was the first person and so far only person to ever have served as the chief of staff to a seated Libertarian delegation.  I just wanted to let you know who I was before I went on.

A couple of quick questions.  Somebody has mentioned about whether it is reasonable to try to take over a county, a state or a country, and I shouldn't use the words "take over" but have political influence on, and I think it's appropriate to talk about a state because America is the country that has historically been the light of liberty in the world, and so it's in the United States that you want to try to relight that fire.  And let's face it, Americans are a little bit reluctant to think about maybe moving to another country.  It's a lot easier to get people to think about moving to another state inside of the United States.  They still have that comfort level.

And so a state is the largest political unit that could be taken over inside the United States.  But I think that in reality it's going to start with some influence inside of a county, then the state, and then a country.  And to address that, somebody said is 2,000 people enough?

Well, here's the thing.  If the 2,000 people who move, who by the way are not just libertarians but are a particular kind of activist libertarians, and so it's not just changing the 2 percent in the state to 2 percent plus 20,000.  It's a completely different thing.  It's changing the 300 activists in the state to 20,300 activists.  But if the 2,000 people do in fact have an effect politically, if they are successful at all politically, then New Hampshire will get a reputation, just as the United States had a reputation for 100 years as being the place to go if you wanted to break the chains, wherever you were living anywhere in the world, New Hampshire will inherit that reputation.

And at that point in time, if we look at these statistics that I think Richard was the one who made available to us, if we just look at California, for example, the net international migration there was 937,831 people, so we're not talking about 20,000 libertarians anymore.  What we're talking about is potentially millions of people from around the world who heard about this light of liberty.  And that's not my question.

[Laughter.]

PARTICIPANT:  But I do think that's why the people in New Hampshire might oppose it.

QUESTION:  I'm sure there are political groups that would oppose this.

Here's my question.  I would like you to speak to my own paranoia.  I'm a long-time libertarian activist, and so I've seen--well, we just heard here that there can be people that are opposed to us, and in fact, we heard earlier that there's some pessimism about whether or not there can be any--whether or not the United States is a basket case, whether or not there can in fact be any change?  Are we already too far down the road?

As a long-time libertarian activist, and paranoid, here's my question--now, remember, I do support the project.  Is this something that the feds would like us to do because it will make it easier to round us up when the time comes?

[Laughter.]

QUESTION:  And as a follow up to that, will this leave libertarians in other states more lonely, isolated and marginalized?  Thank you.

MR. SORENS:  Well, is it possible to be more lonely, isolated, marginalized than you are already?  I don't know.

Will the Feds round us up?  Well, if the Federal Government is really that wicked, then I think no strategy will work.  We might as well just give up politics all together, become apolitical and just reconcile our selves to [inaudible], because any kind of strategy, whether it focuses on getting some house seats, any strategy that would seem to be a threat would be immediately stamped down.

But I don't think that is the case.  I think this is a democracy with a competitive open media, and I don't think suppressing people for their political views would go very far in this country.

MR. BOCK:  Let me just comment on a couple of things we've said.  Now maybe because a certain family decided that they would start some newspapers, and I was fortunate enough to be able to get a job and work for one of them, but we're talking--there's been a lot of talk about, you know, sort of marginalized and [inaudible] minority and all that kind of stuff.  I think it's important to think of libertarianism in at least a sort of ecumenical sense as a mainstream American movement.  You know, it's what the founders were.  I mean even Hamilton, by comparison to today's politician, was a libertarian.

And you know, we found at the Register in Orange County, that we can present a hard-core libertarian message in editorials, and people sort of--of course a lot of people disagree but a lot of people like it.  A lot of Americans really like a libertarian message, a message of liberty presented in a friendly way, presented in a way that--and hardly anybody really is crazy about the government.  Let's think about--we're a mainstream outfit here.  I think it's important to look at that. 

One more thing I wanted to bring up that Jason might comment on.  Several people I've talked to said that, you know, we're getting to the point where baby boomers are going to start to retire, and is there a chance that libertarian baby boomer retirees, who may be in a position to be financially independent, are they going to end up being a source of--and also a retirees generally, have the capacity, the time to be more politically active than people who are still actively working--will they be a component of the Free State Project?

MR. GREVE:  [Inaudible] and accidentally woke up Pat Buchanan.

[Laughter.]

MR. SORENS:  I think that would certainly be desirable if that happened.  So far our demographics indicate that retirees, although a blip on the end, you know, they're bigger than--people ages, say 50 to 64, who are a pretty small minority, so I hope we can get more of those people.  They're certainly, for all the reasons you suggest, more time to be active and often have a lot of capital built up to support organizations and things like that, so I hope that trend does benefit us in the future.

MR. GREVE:  There will be more questions, but Mike Barone has to scoot off in a minute for an important appointment.  We're very grateful to have him here and for his participation.  He has a few words, as a parting shot.

MR. BARONE:  I just want to say that it seems to me the Free State Project is the sort of quintessentially American project, communal but not coercive.  And I would just say to you and the people in the room and other places who are associated with it, good luck.  And I will say to you the two words I always say to libertarians, feel free.

[Laughter.]

MR. BARONE:  Thank you very much.

[Applause.]

QUESTION:  William Kelly, Cox Newspapers.  My question is for Jason.  I was wondering, when you sign people up, do you do any kind of background check on them or anything, to make sure that you're not importing rapists and thieves to New Hampshire?

And I also want to know, what were the other states that were an option besides New Hampshire?

And my final question is: are you planning on moving to New Hampshire too?

MR. SORENS:  No background checks.  I think libertarians wouldn't like that, too privacy invading and too resource consuming as well.  So to some extent this is built on trust.  Everyone I've met has been normal and well adjusted.

The other 9 states were Vermont, Maine, Delaware, North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Alaska.

[End of tape 1, begin tape 2.]
 MR. SORENS:  To the final question, am I moving myself?  Yes.  It will probably take a few years for me to find an academic job in or around New Hampshire, but I definitely plan to move.

QUESTION:  Jenna Wolf, Manchester Union Leader.  I have a couple questions, actually.

Obviously, have you gone to New Hampshire?  Have you talked to residents?  What are their feelings about this?  Are they for it?  Are they against it?

Also, you said 40-percent of people that are moving are married, but have no children.  What is the potential of them having children--

[Laughter.]

QUESTION:  --that you know of?  And, obviously, do you think, I mean, education is a huge issue in New Hampshire.  Schools are struggling with overcrowding.  Do you think, I mean, personally I think New Hampshire residents would feel threatened by this, having 20,000 people move to their state and infiltrate their education system.  So if you could give me a little feedback on that.

MR. SORENS:  Sure.  Well, actually, New Hampshire residents make up a significant proportion of our membership.  We have got 257 people in New Hampshire now, about 235 of those, I guess, were signed up before the vote.  So these were people in New Hampshire, didn't know what state would be chosen, but supported the ideals and signed up--so a very significant proportion of our membership.

And as I mentioned before, we have solicited the opinions of people who live in New Hampshire in our forum.  We have got a special forum for New Hampshire residents to question us.  And the responses I have gotten have been overwhelmingly positive, conditional.  So long as you are good neighbors and really support the political ideals that you talk about, then they are supportive.

Again, New Hampshire is getting 30,000 people every three years already.  So an additional 20,000 doesn't contribute too much to school overcrowding and things like that, especially given the fact that the overwhelming majority of Free Staters will not be using public schools.  We have already set up home-schooling associations and others will use private schools and things like that.

Also, we are not going to be taking any welfare programs.  We are going to be net taxpayers.  So we are going to be contributing more to the state than we take out for sure.

Does that answer your questions?

QUESTION:  My name is Neal Hrab.  I am from the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Jason, I am very interested to learn a little more about your research into Europe.  When you look at these subnational jurisdictions I guess in Italy, and as they become more saturated or kind of self-conscious about their net, sort of net tax-paying status, do they become more and more self-conscious of that?  And are there sort of signposts along the way to that self-consciousness that you will be watching for, I guess, as the Free State Project goes ahead?

MR. SORENS:  I think the self-consciousness actually changes very quickly with the changing fiscal balance in most of these countries.  We even find over time effect.  If there is a change between elections, then it can generate additional support for the types of parties that want to address the issue.

So why haven't we seen that in the U.S. to quite the same extent?  Well, I think the reason is probably twofold.  One is that there aren't, the local cultures aren't as strong and don't make the issue quite as salient.

If you're in Scotland and you think you're being exploited for England, that becomes very salient, much more salient than if you're in Connecticut, and you think you're being exploited for Alabama.  That is not going to have quite the emotional impact.  So that is one reason it is not as strong in the U.S.

The other reason is that social issues are very important in the U.S., and many states that are very dependent on the federal government still vote conservative because of the social issues, so the deep South, some of the Rocky Mountain states, and so that complicates things a bit.  So I think our goal will have to be raising some of that consciousness in New Hampshire.

QUESTION:  Dan Mitchell, Heritage Foundation.  A comment and then a question.

I am ashamed to say my father just moved from New Hampshire to Vermont, but this gives you something to worry about with retirees.  When he earned income, he was happy to be in New Hampshire.  When he was retired completely and was only having property taxes to deal with, he found that Vermont was a much better place to live.  And so you might want to figure out a local community or two that will have very low property taxes.

By the way, also, the list of these Libertarian projects, you forgot Sealand.  I mean, my in-box has all sorts of things about cruise ships and things like that.  I need to share some of those wonderful ideas with you.

PARTICIPANT:  [Off microphone.] [Inaudible.]

QUESTION:  But the question I have for you, Jason, and of course I'm very sympathetic to what you're trying to do, at the end of the day, given that the federal government is two-thirds of government in this country, and given that the federal government controls and directs a lot of what state and local governments do anyhow, even if you have all of these Libertarians in New Hampshire, and they change the political culture so that it's even a better state, I mean, outside of maybe doing something dramatic on school choice, I mean, how many--you're not going to get an opt-out on Social Security.

I can't, even in my fantasy dreams of what things can happen, some things are just so impractical, where school choice might be practical.  And maybe there is another example, and I am hoping you can maybe tell us, if this all works exactly as you want, what can we really hope for?

MR. SORENS:  Well, my own view, and maybe because it's more long run--I'm thinking 20, 25 years down the road--is that maybe we can get some more devolution to New Hampshire.  Our neighbor to the north has been seriously talking sending Social Security to two of the provinces, especially Quebec.  It could happen if becomes a really salient issue, which it isn't really today.

If we've got a couple of senators and a couple of representatives making noise, stonewalling certain things if they need to, if we've got a state that is willing to file Tenth Amendment lawsuits or pass resolutions stating that such and such a federal program is unconstitutional, that sort of sustained pressure I think over time may create a higher degree of federalism.  At least it gives us sort of a beachhead or a start from which to start, and we'll have one state now that is dedicated to the principles of true federalism, and then hopefully it will expand.  Of course, that is going to be  the hardest part.

But I do think school choice is important, however you define it.  I think most of us would probably prefer not vouchers, maybe tax credits or something like that.

PARTICIPANT:  [Off microphone.]   Or separation of school--

MR. SORENS:  Right, or ultimately separation of school and state, I think.

There's utilities, there are gun laws,drug laws, zoning, and then domain, asset forfeiture, all things basically decided, to a large degree, at the state and local levels and things that we can work on in the short run, and I think we will have our plate full, in the short run, with those things.

PARTICIPANT:  Can I have just a follow-up question?  I just happened to write about the No Child Left Behind Act a few months ago and kicked at some research.  New Hampshire was the first state where the state house or assembly or whatever it's called, they actually voted to withdraw from that law before the business community went berserk and killed that proposal in the Senate.  Before you get to school choice, which is actually sort of a big "to do," right? that seems to me a relatively big signal, and it's the kind of thing where I can imagine that, I mean, it's already close, right?  So it stands to reason that with a lot more or with a little more advocacy, with a few more votes, you could make a big difference at the margin.  That would be a huge, huge signal if that were to happen.

MR. SORENS:  Yeah.  There are a lot of clever things states can do to tweak the tail of the federal government.  When I went to Montana-- before we had the state vote, we had our convention out there and one in New Hampshire as well--I talked to people there about a law that they had passed to get around a federal law that said you can't carry a concealed weapon within a thousand yards of a school or something like that, unless you're a law enforcement officer.

So the Montana legislature passes a law, and it gets signed by the governor that says, "Every Montana citizen, for the purposes for federal statute, et cetera, is a law enforcement officer."

[Laughter.]

MR. SORENS:  So there are things you can do.

PARTICIPANT:  Along those same lines, in an altogether different area, there is a bill in the New Hampshire legislature now, I believe, and someone here can correct me, about gold, about making payments in gold.  At least two members of the legislature of New Hampshire have told me about this recently at meetings of the American Legislative Exchange Council and other groups, to require payments in gold.  So New Hampshire may be trying to, on its own, go on the gold standard.

[Laughter.]

PARTICIPANT:  Now, that's probably not going to work, but it is an example of the kind of things you're talking about, and it may make a difference.   Who knows?

MR. GREVE:  We'll have two more questions.

QUESTION:  Hi.  I'm Chris Martin from the Institute for Humane Studies.  I wanted to expand on a comment Jason made about half an hour ago and see what the panel thinks about it.

Jason, you mentioned that one way the project could leverage its impact with existing New Hampshire citizens is to educate them about the opportunities for policy in a Libertarian direction.   So, in a sense, the project would pay the information costs for people to discover these alternatives.

And so what I wanted to suggest was is that one way to do that is to support either existing or new public policy think tanks in New Hampshire.  I know that one exists already.  I think it is called the Josiah Bartlett Center.  And that is something that you could begin now.  You could begin to publicize this among your membership and so, in a sense, the Free State Project would leap into this tragedy of the common and pay the information costs and begin to have a positive impact immediately in New Hampshire.

I just wanted to see what your comments were about that.

MR. SORENS:  Yes, it's already starting.  Of course, you have other groups there besides the Bartlett Center.  You've got New Hampshire Center for Constitutional Studies, Citizens for a Sound Economy.  Many of the people involved with those have also been involved with the Free State Project.

But there is a new organization, New Hampshire Liberty Alliance, formed by basically Libertarian-types within New Hampshire.  It is a nonpartisan league with a variety of goals.  Chief among them are to publicize public policy positions that they support and also to publicize candidates' positions on those public policies and try to influence elections that way.  So I think that will be an important organization in the future: nhliberty.org.

QUESTION:  Hi.  Joe Edden [ph].  I'm a photojournalist with the Washington Times.

I've been following one of your members for the past couple of months as he migrated from New Jersey to New Hampshire, and I've met quite a few of the members up there.

First, just kind of a technical question here.  There are a lot of rumors going around about the people who opted out from the West Coast about a second free state.  Is Wyoming going to be pursued or is that something that is going to be on the back burner until things move along more in New Hampshire?

MR. SORENS:  We allowed people to opt out, before we had the vote, of certain states that they didn't want to move to.  And, roughly, 1,000 people opted out of New Hampshire, which was typical for most of the states, except Alaska.  There were like 2,000 that opted out of Alaska.  And about 300 of those after the vote later recommitted and said they do want to move to New Hampshire.

That leaves about 700, and they were from all over the place.  Some of them were Western, some of them were Eastern, maybe from the South, people who had just one favorite state, for example.  So there is a very small group that is interested in eventually pursuing a Free State West.  They haven't yet really gotten an organization together or started signing people up.

Ultimately, I think a few years down the road, the Free State Project, once we have gotten basically our mission accomplished in New Hampshire, gotten people to move reach 20,000, start one for people who don't want to move to New Hampshire out West.  But right now it is just in the very initial stages.

QUESTION:  The other question real quick was there's been a lot of talk about global ideas, about free market economies and instituting change on larger levels than just the state.  Personally, it seems to me that by effecting, you know, it's going to be more effective as a program of attraction rather than promotion.  Can you effect change in the local school district?  Can you effect change in that county?

And with Libertarians being a large portion of the makeup, and it is like carting around a wheelbarrow full of frogs, how do you keep people's eyes on the prize or is that even something that you're interested in doing?

MR. SORENS:  Well--

QUESTION:  And how do you keep people patient, to effect change at a local level and establish a beachhead?

MR. SORENS:  I think you need little victories now and then to show that things are moving in the right direction, and I think those little victories are going to be driven by people who are not Free State Project members, are going to be driven by the people who lived in New Hampshire all their lives and know what's going on.   And they'll be supported by Free State Project members, but we won't be in the front lines of a lot of these debates and policy changes, but it is important to have a sensation of progress, and we will highlight when we can what is going on in New Hampshire, the latest legislative proposals and latest bills that have been passed and things like that in order to attract people and show that, yes, it's actually working, and you can move and be a part of it.

MR. GREVE:  One more.

QUESTION:  R.J. Smith, Center for Private Conservation.

Jason, have you or other people at sort of the top of this movement, have you traveled into any of the really small rock-rib conservative towns in New Hampshire to talk to the antigovernment conservatives to see how they view antigovernment Libertarians?

I mean, it's true there is a very strong tradition of antigovernment conservatives.  Remember Governor Meldrim Thompson on United Nations Day used to order all state flags flown at half-mast.

[Laughter.]

QUESTION:  But still these people tend to be culturally very conservative and very proper, and while they may share your antigovernment sentiments, they may feel that you're going to be opening porn shops on every corner or houses of prostitution.  I mean, I wonder whether that cultural thing sort of counters some of the antigovernment philosophy.

MR. SORENS:  Right.  Well, it's really speculation at this point.

Now, I like to emphasize that I, myself, am culturally very conservative.  That is just what I happen to be.  My wife and I were both, we would be religious conservatives if we weren't antigovernment across-the-board.  So I think there are different types in the Free State Project.  There are people who maybe more fit the Libertine type of model, but hopefully they are going to move to places where they can more or less get away with that, the larger [audio break], basically, where people aren't concerned as much about a single odd individual in the population.

I think the point is to stress that our views are political, and that doesn't determine what our lifestyle choices are and the types of communities we like to build, the types of associations we're involved in, and that will depend on individual preferences.  I think many of us are going to fit right into that New Hampshire culture, at least we're going to stress that people ought to try to do that.

PARTICIPANT:  Just a comment.  It might be relevant.  I used to talk to Carl Hess, before he died and after he moved to West Virginia, and I would see him at conferences.  Carl was a radical anarchist, refused to pay income taxes, you know, this sort of scruffy-bearded character, quasi-hippy, quasi-motorcycle.  But he said he just got along fine with the people that were his neighbors in rural West Virginia because it was basically as long as you're not bothering me, as long as you're not impinging on me, I don't give a damn what kind of crazy ideas you might have.  Just don't try to impose them on me.

And I think that's important for Libertarians to think about because that's really sort of the core of the philosophy is you may have strong opinions, but the strongest is that you don't have the right to impose them on anybody else.  So to live in a free society is to be a good neighbor.

MR. GREVE:  Just one last piece of sociological fact that I actually happen to know.  The general presumption is that as the United States becomes more economically homogeneous, and it is becoming more economically homogeneous, the states will also become more culturally homogeneous, and it turns o