The New York Times has a piece today about the Free State Project, the brainchild of some libertarian Yalies (not surprising, given the tendency of an Ivy League college environment to inculcate - rightly - social freedom and - wrongly - a false faith in economic meritocracy), to move as many libertarians as possible to New Hampshire and achieve a critical mass so to swing elections and eventually build the kind of libertarian state which neither the Democrats nor the Republicans want to see realized: "Having so many people move into a state means we can really raise issues," Mr. Somma said. "Once we start to elect people to the Statehouse, I think the low-hanging fruit will be issues like educational reform and medical marijuana." Like many on the left, I'd argue that libertarians are right to embrace civil liberties but that the substantive ability of the individual to live a full and self-determined life depends much more on freedom from want than property rights. I have little sympathy for folks like Jackie Casey, who wants a machine gun for Christmas, hopes to destroy the government safety net entirley, and says: "I want to be a billionaire in my lifetime...and I don't want to live among people who think that's bad...I radically oppose public education. It's demeaning and it creates criminals...The thing that hurts poor people is they don't know how to think of themselves as rich."" That said, I think these libertarians are right to recognize that their voices - like those of Catholic workers, socialists, anarchists, nativists, and a slew of other ideological groups (some more savory than others), as well as those of most sexual, religious, or ethnic minorities - are underrepresented in a two-party, winner-takes-all, regionally-based system. That underrepresentation is a vital culprit in the narrowing of political discourse in this country. So what I as left-of-Democrat and Jackie Casey as a libertarian have in common is a shared interest in a political system that really represents us - even without asking us to pack up and leave our state.