LIBERTARIANplace

Howelling-at-the-Moon

Have We Been Missing the Point?

Instead of Changing the Country, We Just Resign from It

The Liberty Option

Minneapolis

September 1, 2008

It hit me like a ton of gold bricks. All this time we've been struggling to change the government, to educate society to help us change the government, to win our liberty back.

But maybe we've taken the wrong approach. What brought this to mind was a comment a reader made on my column "Ron Paul and The Libertarian Party" at The Nolan Chart. He said if the Libertarian Party ever achieved parity with the big two, "you" (meaning me) wouldn't belong to it. He said what gives Ron Paul his power is that he "leaves us alone."

I thought about that for a while. It really bothered me-- the idea that libertarians function best in a post-party purgatory where we tell the truth about liberty, about the illusion that the United States is still "a free country," but have given up the goal of gaining liberty through electoral victory. It bothered me so much I wrote a response to my responses. I said "It takes a village to raise a child and it takes a party to defeat a party." (Ron Paul and Party Politics at the Nolan Chart.) And then the light went on.

What if we could just opt out. What if we stopped trying to change the government and just start lobbying them to give us the option of opting out of taxation and paying user fees for any government services, infrastructure, or programs we choose to use. I wonder how many people would take that optioin. Perhaps that would be the beginning of the "Revolution."

And now I'm starting to take that one step further. What if it were possible to opt out of citizenship. What if we could be individual sovereigns. No obligations to the government. No government obligations to us? What would that look like? Could it work?