Jason Sorens | |
---|---|
Born | Houston, Texas, U.S. |
Alma mater | Yale University, PhD political science Washington and Lee University, BA in economics and philosophy |
Occupation(s) | Professor and author |
Website | freestateproject e3ne |
Jason Sorens is an American political scientist and a conservative libertarian activist. He founded the Free State Project in 2001.
Sorens lives in Amherst, New Hampshire with his wife Olga and their children. [1]
Sorens received his B.A. in economics and philosophy, with honors, from Washington and Lee University and his PhD in political science from Yale University. [2]
Sorens is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), a conservative libertarian think-tank. [1] Previously, Sorens was the director of the Center for Ethics in Society at St. Anselm College [3] and prior to that he was a lecturer in the department of government at Dartmouth College. He has been an affiliated scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University since 2008. His primary research interests include fiscal federalism, public policy in federal systems, secessionism, and ethnic politics.
Sorens' book Secessionism: Identity, Interest, and Strategy was published by McGill-Queen's University Press in 2012. [4]
He is president and co-founder of the Ethics and Economics Education of New England (E3NE), a libertarian education non-profit. [5] [6]
In July 2001, Sorens published an essay titled "Announcement: The Free State Project", [7] in which he proposed the idea of a political migration, with 20,000 libertarians to move to a single low-population state (New Hampshire, selected in 2003) to make the state a stronghold for libertarian ideas. [8]
As of November 26, 2021, over 20,000 people had signed this statement of intent [9] —completing the original goal—with 5,223 people listed as "movers" to New Hampshire on the FSP website, saying they had already moved to New Hampshire as part of the 20,000+-participant trigger. [10] As of May 2022, approximately 6,232 participants have moved to New Hampshire for the Free State Project. [11]
Murray Newton Rothbard was an American economist of the Austrian School, economic historian, political theorist, and activist. Rothbard was a central figure in the 20th-century American libertarian movement, particularly its right-wing strands, and was a founder and leading theoretician of anarcho-capitalism. He wrote over twenty books on political theory, history, economics, and other subjects.
New Hampshire is a state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Gulf of Maine to the east, and the Canadian province of Quebec to the north. Of the 50 U.S. states, New Hampshire is the seventh-smallest by land area and the tenth-least populous, with a population of 1,377,529 residents as of the 2020 census. Concord is the state capital and Manchester is the most populous city. New Hampshire's motto, "Live Free or Die", reflects its role in the American Revolutionary War; its nickname, "The Granite State", refers to its extensive granite formations and quarries. It is well known nationwide for holding the first primary in the U.S. presidential election cycle, and for its resulting influence on American electoral politics.
The Free State Project (FSP) is an American political migration movement founded in 2001 to recruit at least 20,000 libertarians to move to a single low-population state in order to make the state a stronghold for libertarian ideas. The Free State Project is not a political party but a nonprofit organization.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a German-American academic associated with Austrian School economics, anarcho-capitalism, right-wing libertarianism, and opposition to democracy. He is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), senior fellow of the Mises Institute think tank, and the founder and president of the Property and Freedom Society.
Richard M. Ebeling is an American libertarian author who was the president of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) from 2003 to 2008. Ebeling is currently the BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina.
Saint Anselm College is a private Benedictine liberal arts college mostly in Goffstown, New Hampshire. Founded in 1889, it is the third-oldest Catholic college in New England. Named after Saint Anselm of Canterbury, the college continues to have a fully functioning and independent Benedictine abbey attached to it, Saint Anselm Abbey. As of 2017, its enrollment was approximately 2,000.
Jeffrey Albert Tucker is an American libertarian writer, publisher, entrepreneur and advocate of anarcho-capitalism and Bitcoin.
Foot voting is expressing one's preferences through one's actions, by voluntarily participating in or withdrawing from an activity, group, or process; especially, physical migration to leave a situation one does not like, or to move to a situation one regards as more beneficial. People who engage in foot voting are said to "vote with their feet".
In the United States, libertarianism is a political philosophy promoting individual liberty. According to common meanings of conservatism and liberalism in the United States, libertarianism has been described as conservative on economic issues and liberal on personal freedom, though this is disputed. The movement is often associated with a foreign policy of non-interventionism. Broadly, there are four principal traditions within libertarianism, namely the libertarianism that developed in the mid-20th century out of the revival tradition of classical liberalism in the United States after liberalism associated with the New Deal; the libertarianism developed in the 1950s by anarcho-capitalist author Murray Rothbard, who based it on the anti-New Deal Old Right and 19th-century libertarianism and American individualist anarchists such as Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner while rejecting the labor theory of value in favor of Austrian School economics and the subjective theory of value; the libertarianism developed in the 1970s by Robert Nozick and founded in American and European classical liberal traditions; and the libertarianism associated with the Libertarian Party, which was founded in 1971, including politicians such as David Nolan and Ron Paul.
Peter Joseph Boettke is an American economist of the Austrian school. He is currently a professor of economics and philosophy at George Mason University; the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism, vice president for research, and director of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
Right-libertarianism, also known as libertarian capitalism, or right-wing libertarianism, is a libertarian political philosophy that supports capitalist property rights and defends market distribution of natural resources and private property. The term right-libertarianism is used to distinguish this class of views on the nature of property and capital from left-libertarianism, a variant of libertarianism that combines self-ownership with an egalitarian approach to property and income. In contrast to socialist libertarianism, right-libertarianism supports free-market capitalism. Like most forms of libertarianism, it supports civil liberties, especially natural law, negative rights, the non-aggression principle, and a significant transformation of the modern welfare state.
The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) is a libertarian think tank located in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1933 by Edward C. Harwood, an economist and investment advisor, and is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Since January 2022, the organization's president has been William P. Ruger, formerly of the Charles Koch Institute.
New Hampshire is often noted for its moderate politics and its status as a prominent swing state. Voters predominantly selected Republicans for national office during the 19th and 20th centuries until 1992. Since then, the state has been considered a swing state. Since 2006, control of the state legislature and New Hampshire's congressional seats have switched back and forth between Republicans and Democrats. Although the state has voted for the Democratic candidate in the last six presidential elections since 2004, it has done so by relatively small, however consistent margins.
The Porcupine Freedom Festival, commonly known as PorcFest, is an event held annually every June since 2004 in the U.S. state of New Hampshire. The festival is the main event held by the Free State Project, a libertarian organization that advocates for the relocation of libertarians to New Hampshire in order to make the state a stronghold for their movement. The festival has been described as "the libertarian version of Burning Man" and "the largest gathering of libertarians in the world". The festival on average hosts approximately 1,500 attendees.
Steven G. Horwitz was an American economist of the Austrian School. Horwitz was the Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise in the department of economics in the Miller College of Business at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. In 2017, he retired as the Dana Professor of Economics Emeritus at St. Lawrence University.
Edward Peter Stringham is an Austrian School American economist, former President of the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and the Davis Professor of Economic Innovation at Trinity College (Connecticut).
Carla Gericke is an author, activist, and attorney. Born in South Africa, she immigrated to the United States in the 1990s after winning a green card in the Diversity Visa Lottery. She became a U.S. citizen in 2000. Gericke practiced law in South Africa, and California, working at Apple Computer, Borland, Logitech, and Scient Corporation. Gericke is President Emeritus of the Free State Project. In 2014, she won a landmark First Circuit Court of Appeals case that affirmed the First Amendment right to film police officers. That same year, she was named one of New Hampshire Magazine's "2014 Remarkable Women" In 2016, Gericke ran as a Republican for New Hampshire State Senate in District 20 against Democrat Lou D'Allesandro, garnering 40% of the vote in the general election. In 2018, after a successful recount on a write-in campaign on the Libertarian Party's ballot, she ran as a fusion Republican/Libertarian candidate and received 42% of the vote, up two percentage points in a year when District 20 swung 12–15% left due to the "Blue Wave." In 2020, Gericke ran again against D'Allesandro in District 20 and again lost, this time by a vote tally of 13,548 to 10,479, or approximately 56–44%.
Elizabeth Edwards is an American politician and former Democratic member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives who represented the Hillsborough 11th district from 2014 to 2018.
The 2018 New Hampshire gubernatorial election took place on November 6, 2018, to elect the governor of New Hampshire. Incumbent Republican governor Chris Sununu won re-election to a second term, defeating former state senator Molly Kelly. Sununu was the first incumbent Republican to win reelection as governor since Steve Merrill was reelected in 1994.
Jeremy Kauffman is an American entrepreneur and political activist known for founding and leading the blockchain-based filesharing project LBRY. Kauffman is also known as a vocal supporter and activist within the Free State Project (FSP) and a former board member. The FSP is a movement designed to get libertarians to move to the state of New Hampshire. Kauffman was the Libertarian nominee in the 2022 United States Senate election in New Hampshire, losing to Democrat Maggie Hassan.