Hmm. The other day I blogged a bit about the tendency toward isolationism among some libertarians. In a rare display of wishy-washiness (is that a word?), I hemmed and hawed about intervention vs. non-intervention, and pretty much sat on the fence. Now along comes Justin Raimondo to counter the claims of Virginia Postrel and company. I can't say I'm comfortable with his (past?) support for Pat Buchanan, but on the other hand the neo-conservatives don't come out of his critique smelling very good either. The USA has strayed so far from its non-interventionist roots it's not even funny. I'm not sure when we became an imperial power, a superpower, a hyperpower, but I don't have to like it.
Is there nowhere on earth for someone who just wants to be an individual and not a citizen of the empire or some less expansive yet still authoritarian government? It's enough to make me consider even more seriously the value of secession, along the lines of an article yesterday by Walter Williams. If the true peace-loving, non-imperialistic, progressive liberals and libertarians have no voice and are forced (and I do not use that term lightly) to support American intervention all over the globe, would it not make moral and political sense for them to withdraw their support by seeking refuge and freedom in some smaller political entity? Is the time drawing near for a new declaration of independence?
That's what my friends at the Free State Project are advocating, though they don't always frame the issues in such progressive terms. The FSP is exploring the idea of encouraging a large number of freedom-loving Americans to move to a specific (and yet-to-be-chosen) state in order to more vigorously expand freedom in at least that one state. Absent a system of proportional voting (which ain't gonna happen), this strikes me more and more as perhaps the only viable strategy for freedom in America. For geopolitical reasons, I'm coming to think that the best location for such a movement is probably Maine, since it is separate enough to legitimately claim sovereignty if it came to that, yet not as strategically valuable to the federal government as Alaska or Hawaii. Sure, a free state movement is probably a pipe dream, but freedom-loving people have got to try something, because the way things are going we're all going to be subjects of a fascist state in another ten years.