KEENE, NH – Last week the crew of the Motorhome Diaries was in New Hampshire to visit our friends in Keene and to attend the 2009 Porcupine Freedom Festival. While in Keene I was able to talk to Ian Freeman of Free Talk Live, which bills itself as 100% Pro-Liberty Talk Radio. Like me, Ian is a voluntaryist which, according to Wikipedia, is:

a philosophy that opposes anything that it sees as unjustifiably invasive and coercive. Voluntaryism regards government as coercive, and calls for its abolishment, but, unlike a number of other anarchist philosophies, it supports strong property rights which it regards as a natural law that is compatible with non-coercion.

The goal of voluntaryism is the supplantation of the state by a voluntary order, in which political authority is reverted to the individual, and association among people occurs only by mutual consent. Voluntaryists believe voluntaryism itself should be the means to achieve this goal, rather than forceful action.

The term voluntaryism is often used today as a synonym for free-market anarchist or anarcho-capitalist philosophies. The voluntaryist movement, however, is distinct in its rejection of electoral politics. Because they consider electoral politics to be counterproductive or immoral, voluntaryists seek to dismantle the state by non-political means such as secession, counter-economics, civil disobedience and education, rather than voting.

Six nights a week Ian discusses the ideas of a voluntary society on his show and has seen fellow voluntaryist move to his adopted community of Keene, New Hampshire to practice their peaceful beliefs. At the end of the Motorhome Diaries in 2010, Pete and I plan to take part in Keene’s peaceful evolution. Learn more at FreeKeene.com.