Building a community of peaceful, liberty-minded people can create change and build freedom at the local level. New Hampshire...Live Free or Die!
0:00 Ashe Oro: You're listening to the Liberty Entrepreneurs Podcast, episode 86, What is the Free State Project? Let's go.
0:19 Ashe Oro: Hey, so what's up, everyone? Welcome to the Liberty Entrepreneurs Podcast. I've got on the show today a very interesting guy who I've known for a couple years, and he's actually a client of Liberty Virtual Assistants. We got Rodger Paxton. He is on the board of the Free State Project in New Hampshire, which is the reason that I brought him on, but he's also the producer of PorcFest. If my libertarian audience knows what PorcFest is, this is one of the key guys that creates PorcFest for you, and he's the founder and host of The LAVA Flow Podcast, which is part of the Pax Libertas Productions Network. Rodger, welcome to Liberty Entrepreneurs.
0:58 Rodger Paxton: Thanks for having me, Ashe. It's great to connect.
1:00 Ashe Oro: Yeah. Rodger, let's just get started here. What is the Free State Project, and how did you hear about it?
1:07 Rodger Paxton: The Free State Project was started, oh, goodness, about 15 years ago, I guess, now as a ... It was a thesis that Jason Sorens was doing for one of his degrees and was basically an idea of bringing a bunch of libertarians, 20,000, to one small state so they could centralize their activism, their voting, whatever libertarians can do to make that state the freest state in the country, possibly, and exert the maximum effort that they could to make that happen.
1:38 Rodger Paxton: It started, like I said, about 15 years ago. They looked at 10 different states. New Hampshire won the vote, and so then people started moving here almost immediately 10 or 12 years ago, matter of fact, I know several people who have been here for 10 years. I first found out about it in 2010 I believe it was, at the National Libertarian Party Convention. They had a booth there, of all things, and my wife and I were talking to the folks, and I'm for Arkansas. I'm from the deep South.
2:08 Ashe Oro: Right.
2:08 Rodger Paxton: I'm from hot, humid. That's what I love, right? I thought, "There's no way I'm ever going to move to New Hampshire. It snows, and it's cold." I didn't think about it for years, and then after being the chairman of the Libertarian Party for a while and banging my head against that wall, I realized, I've got to do something different. Something has to change.
2:26 Ashe Oro: Yes.
2:27 Rodger Paxton: We started looking at it again. Three years ago, actually, next week will be our three-year anniversary we moved up here, and I've loved being here. It's been amazing journey.
2:36 Ashe Oro: I believe you're a Ron Paul as well, likewise. I remember him saying back in the 2008 election cycle this concept of vote with your feet. What does that mean, and how does the Free State Project tie into that?
2:50 Rodger Paxton: Well, libertarianism is a minority opinion, sadly, and in order to be able to affect libertarian change, we really have to vote with our feet and get these people in one central location. You're never going to have a libertarian government in Texas because they are just so outnumbered, the same with California, the same with most states in the country, you're never going to affect enough change to really have liberty in your lifetime, which is the tagline for the Free State Project.
3:16 Rodger Paxton: Getting 20,000 libertarians in New Hampshire, we can make a huge change. There are so many things going on in New Hampshire. I mean, New Hampshire has over 400 state representatives. That means that the state rep to constituent ratio is extremely low. I mean, I can actually call my state rep on the phone and have a conversation with this person. Tell me where else in the world you can do that?
3:38 Ashe Oro: Right.
3:39 Rodger Paxton: Almost nowhere.
3:40 Ashe Oro: Yeah.
3:41 Rodger Paxton: Being able to affect change like that is so important, and that's why we're trying to get so many here.
3:44 Ashe Oro: Yeah, and compare and contrast that with the federal government and your ability to actually affect change there?
3:52 Rodger Paxton: I have never actually been able to shake the hand of one of my representatives from the federal government ever. I've seen one or two from a distance, but that's the closest. Every once in a while, when I was active in politics, I would get a form letter back if I send an email to my representative. That's about the interaction you get. Of course, you know that it's making no difference. You know you're not making any real change.
4:15 Ashe Oro: Yeah.
4:15 Rodger Paxton: Here, you can actually influence representatives and make change.
4:19 Ashe Oro: Yeah.
4:19 Rodger Paxton: As a matter of fact, we have over two dozen Free State Project members sitting in the State House as representatives right now.
4:26 Ashe Oro: Oh, wow. Yeah, so you said about 200?
4:30 Rodger Paxton: About two dozen, well over two dozen.
4:31 Ashe Oro: Oh, two dozen. I was like, "Yes, 200." That would be awesome.
4:34 Rodger Paxton: I wish I could say 200. Basically, we'll be there in utopia if there were 200.
4:37 Ashe Oro: Yeah, right? How many libertarian type or like-minded ... I don't even like to call people libertarian anymore. It's like free-thinking people, people who want to be left alone, people who believe in property rights, people who understand that governance on the local level is much more effective than governance when you start scaling up the chain up to the federal level, or heaven forbid we ever get a one-world government of some sort like they're testing out in the EU right now with having the Brussels ... Oh, no, like bureaucrats meeting Brussels and try to represent What has been like for you as an entrepreneur to move to a place where you feel like you at least have some level of control over the governing body?
5:27 Rodger Paxton: I'm going to be honest. I never even considered entrepreneurship before I moved here. I thought I was always going to be corporate drone. I was a director of IT for healthcare companies, and I thought the best way to do that was to be a corporate drone and sit in a cube for 10 hours a day, and that was my life. We moved up here, like I said, three years ago, and being around all of the entrepreneurship here just lit a fire in me, like a fire live I've never seen.
5:53 Rodger Paxton: As a matter of fact, the week before PorcFest this year, I lost that corporate drone job, and because I've been working on entrepreneurship and making things happen, it didn't matter. We're still making things happen. We're still making that income. Now, I'm living more free than I've ever lived in my life because I have that entrepreneurship lifestyle where I can stay at home, be with my kids, stop in the middle of the day, and spend an hour watching Star Wars with my kids or whatever the case may be.
6:19 Rodger Paxton: My life has completely done a 180 and that's because of the entrepreneurship spirit in New Hampshire. There are so many libertarian businesses coming out of here. There's cryptocurrency businesses like LBRY. There are regular mom-and-pop shops like Route 11 Goods in Keene. There's media companies. There's so many different libertarian type entrepreneurship companies in New Hampshire that if you're a liberty entrepreneur, New Hampshire is the place to be.
6:46 Ashe Oro: Have you been able to actually affect regulation to make it easy for entrepreneurs because every regulation that the government puts on the books, in some way, shape, or form, restricts the freedom for an entrepreneur to create value to build their business?
7:00 Rodger Paxton: Absolutely, one of the big ones, probably the biggest last year, was New Hampshire, thanks to libertarians going and speaking to our representatives, representatives from LBRY that I mentioned, went and spoke at these hearings, Free Keene and in different places. They are completely hands off now in New Hampshire for cryptocurrency. There is no regulation for cryptocurrency in New Hampshire because of liberty entrepreneurs going and saying, "Hey, this is how we do business. You are going to cripple us if you put restrictions and regulations on cryptocurrency." New Hampshire, as far as I know, is the only state that is completely hands off for cryptocurrency.
7:37 Ashe Oro: Yeah. When you say there's no regulation, there's no government regulation. We still have all the free market baked in regulation.
7:45 Rodger Paxton: Absolutely. Yeah, and I mean strictly government. Obviously, some cryptocurrencies have more regulations than others, and the market will decide on that. I think that that is absolutely the best way to do it. I prefer to use deregulated cryptocurrencies. That's the way I do business.
8:01 Ashe Oro: Yeah. Let's follow that trail for a minute. Back in 2017, everyone was talking about ICOs, and a lot of people made a lot of money. A lot of people lost a lot of money. As soon as people start losing money, then they start screaming for Big Brother to come in and start regulating things. Let's just think of how does the marketplace regulate something like ICOs, new technology, somebody doesn't really know exactly what it is. Most likely, the people screaming for regulation are the ones that are left holding the bag because they just try to get rich. They didn't care about the tech. They didn't care about the community.
8:39 Rodger Paxton: Right.
8:40 Ashe Oro: The market regulates this activity. This is not value-add activity in the marketplace. Pure trying to get rich quick is not really benefiting. Yes, okay, it's price discovery of these tokens, so I can appreciate someone thinking that the price that they're buying is less so than the price than they can sell for. This is just simple price discovery, but markets regulate people who try to, let's say, gamble on price discovery by rewarding the people who were right and taking that value and capital away from the people who were wrong as the price reflects the true value. Do you think that these people would invest again in these ICOs? Well, no, probably not.
9:25 Rodger Paxton: Well, and you mentioned that they didn't care about the tech. They didn't care about the community, and that was the problem. That was the problem. They didn't investigate. They just heard, "Hey, this is a get-rich-quick scheme. I'm just going to jump in without looking at it at all and seeing what chance it has of success or failure." They learned their lesson really quickly. Most of those people, you're right, will probably never jump back into cryptocurrency, at least until it becomes more mainstream, but certainly, they won't be trying to throw a bunch of money at ICOs that may or not happen.
9:53 Rodger Paxton: Have we actually seen a truly successful ICO yet? I mean, not really. There's a lot of reason for that, but a lot of it is because, number one, we had a huge downturn in the cryptocurrency prices, which meant a lot less capital for companies to do things, but also, a lot of the ICO industry were fly-by-night companies who were literally just trying to scam people. Others of those were ideas that really had no reason being on a blockchain. That's the latest buzzword. Oh, I'm going to put it on my blockchain. Well, not everything needs to be on a blockchain.
10:25 Ashe Oro: Right.
10:26 Rodger Paxton: That's just the way it is. A lot of those companies, like a blockchain VPN, well, I'm sorry, I just don't understand the idea behind that. Why do you need to have a blockchain VPN? I have a VPN that works perfectly fine, and it's not a blockchain.
10:38 Ashe Oro: Yeah. No, I know. I think Ethereum is known as the blockchain that launched all these ICOs. I agree with you. Not very many ICOs were successful, and so a lot of people needed to lose a lot of money.
10:53 Rodger Paxton: Yeah.
10:53 Ashe Oro: I should mention that I think that EOS was probably the most successful project that I see on Ethereum, even though they eventually created their own blockchain and now have a successful working product out there, but that's neither here nor there. Rodger, let's talk about PorcFest because I know quite a few of my listeners will know what PorcFest is, but quite a few won't. What is PorcFest? What's the origin of PorcFest, and what does PorcFest stand for?
11:22 Rodger Paxton: PorcFest stands for the Porcupine Freedom Festival. This past summer, in June, we had our 15th annual PorcFest. A PorcFest is basically a week of living our values. We all go out into the woods of New Hampshire at Rodgers Campground, and we spend a week trading with each other voluntarily, spending time with each other, and just living a libertarian lifestyle. It's almost like an anarchist utopia. That's kind of what I like to liken it to, but that's what it is because you've got a bunch of libertarians an anarchist together.
11:54 Rodger Paxton: A lot of people say it's the libertarian version of Burning Man, but it's really man because a lot of Burning Man ... Burning Man is great. I've never actually been, but I've heard it's amazing, but it basically this communist undervalues. You can't buy anything with actual money and all of that, whereas PorcFest is literally like an anarchist utopia. You can buy almost anything you can imagine from food to any kind of cryptocurrency to camping supplies. I mean, you name it, you can buy it there, even some illicit substances, possibly, allegedly.
12:30 Ashe Oro: Only illicit in the government's terms.
12:32 Rodger Paxton: Right. Exactly.
12:33 Ashe Oro: Only illicit through one corporation, aka, the government's opinion, but anyways.
12:38 Rodger Paxton: Right. Absolutely, the biggest monopoly. Absolutely. You can do all of this voluntarily, but it's not just that, it's also ... We have speakers. It's almost like a huge conference. We had over 250 events at this past PorcFest, everything from seeing your favorite podcaster do a live show too, Ben Swann on the main stage giving a keynote speech. I mean, we had it all.
13:01 Ashe Oro: Yeah.
13:01 Rodger Paxton: The best thing about PorcFest is that it's great for everybody. If you're single and you want to meet singles, or if you are a family and you have your kids with you. I mean, my two kids are 10 and 12 now have been to every PorcFest the last three years. The first time they came, they said, "Man, this is better than Disney World." If I had only known that years before, I could've saved thousands of dollars.
13:23 Ashe Oro: I was actually about to ask you, like what do you feel about kids? People hear this idea of anarchist, and they think about scarf-wearing, Molotov-cocktail-throwing, car-flipping, is this what goes on here, or is ...
13:38 Rodger Paxton: No, what you're talking about is authoritarian anarchism. What we're talking about is actual anarchism where people want to interact with each other voluntarily without any use of force, especially use of force by the government. Will you see a lot of people carrying weapons? Absolutely. I carried my pistol all week. You'll see people AR-15, AK-47s, swords, the whole nine yards, but we've never had an issue because we all have this base of understanding that we are going to interact voluntarily. If I don't want to interact with you, I'll either leave PorcFest or I will go to another part of PorcFest.
14:10 Ashe Oro: Right.
14:11 Rodger Paxton: It's a 200-acre facility.
14:13 Ashe Oro: Right.
14:13 Rodger Paxton: Just go somewhere else.
14:14 Ashe Oro: Yeah. You mentioned that Burning Man is a bit on the communist side. I would say maybe the anarcho-communist, whereas PorcFest is on the capitalist, anarcho-capitalist. I, myself, agree with the anarcho-capitalist philosophy, but can you try to describe the similarities and differences between and Ancom and an Ancap?
14:40 Rodger Paxton: Well, so Ancoms say that they want the end of government, yet they call for government assistance and communal assistance all the time. As long as it's done voluntarily, I have no issue with it. If you want to have a communist commune where everybody comes and voluntarily lives in that commune and voluntarily pulls all of their resources, I'm great with that. The problem is that these Ancoms are not so much against the state as they against capitalism and corporatism.
15:10 Rodger Paxton: Oh, I'm against corporatism as well, but I'm certainly not against capitalist, whereas anarcho-capitalism believes that without capitalism, we would not be where we are today and that it also believes that capitalism is the voluntary solution. Now, the word capitalism has been muddied quite a bit over the last couple of decades to where it doesn't mean free market the way that it used to. I generally prefer the term free market over capitalism, but those two words can be interchangeable.
15:39 Ashe Oro: Right. Yeah, and what do you think drives anarcho-communist? What is their mindset? I know a lot of people are angry at the government, and understandably so. They currently are modern day slave drivers. I make money at my job, let's say. They steal X percentage of it before I ever see it. Basically, so I'm working for free for them. If that's not slavery, I don't know what the definition is, but what do you think is the mindset of someone, as in anarcho-communist, and should libertarians and free people and anarcho-capitalist try to pull these people in, or try to engage with these types of people, or is the mindset so incredibly different that their fruit is hanging too high on the tree?
16:36 Rodger Paxton: Well, I think that a lot of anarcho-communists believe that they want fairness, that they really do want fairness for everybody, equality for everybody. They just see equality as different. They want equality of outcomes, whereas we prefer equality of opportunity. I think that that's a big dividing factor, whether we should interact with them and try to pull them over, it really depends on the individual income. I mean, some of them are so vehement in their hatred of anything that creates a profit that I don't think that they can ever be swayed.
17:11 Rodger Paxton: A lot of the rank and file, sure, I mean, I had conversations with Ancoms. Being here in New Hampshire, we had our share as well. Ran into some at a comic book store one time, a couple of years ago, and they had all the Bernie gear on and everything and had a discussion with them about how the free market has progressed us to where we are today. I actually read an article earlier today about how infant mortality rate around the world, even in third-world countries, is dropping dramatically. That's not because of communism. That is because of the free market. I think when you start showing people these things, even anarcho-communists, even they can start to understand.
17:48 Ashe Oro: Well, I hope so. I would love to switch gears here Rodger and talk about Star Wars because I know that you love Star Wars and you make a lot of similarities between Star Wars and our current society. Where did you start to notice this difference and just walk us down your thought path around the similarities here?
18:15 Rodger Paxton: I actually used to do a podcast with a friend of mine, that's on hiatus right now, called Resist the Empire - A libertarian view of the Star Wars universe. It's