Hello, everyone. My name is Bryce Nielsen. You probably saw the piece Pete Eyre just wrote about me and my plans for a Liberty Caravan. Thank you, Pete. I will be posting on here periodically for the duration of the caravan.
I wanted to take the time and introduce myself a little and say a few things about why I am moving. Next post will be about my caravan.
First of all, I really didn’t have all that far to go to get to the ideas of liberty. I usually term myself as a libertarian, rather than as a Voluntaryist, perhaps I’ll go into the reasons in a future post.
I was raised as a conservative (though always with great concern for limited government and following the Constitution – my father and grandfather frequently exchanged letters talking about how messed up the federal government was, yet there was some inconsistency in that my father shortly thereafter took a job with the US Customs Service, where he would routinely search for and confiscate drugs. I really didn’t understand true freedom then. But I did know enough to be suspicious of government officials who claimed to be serving the public, I learned that from my father. I just thought it was weird that he took potatoes that the law didn’t allow to come in from Canada, but would bring them home for us to eat (they couldn’t be planted in the US, for fear of spreading pests from Canadian crops to US crops).
My journey from conservative to libertarian really began when I studied a little economics in college. We learned in this class about how supply and demand interact, and how price ceilings and floors distort the market and create shortages and surpluses, and also the problems caused by monopolies (but we didn’t hear in this class that most monopolies are actually government-run or -created, and pollution and other “externalities” that only government can supposedly handle were presented). Anyway, that class gave me the framework and background to see the inconsistencies in statist ideas later on.
A few years later, about the same time I graduated, the internet really came into full bloom. I did vote for George W. Bush in 2000, which I greatly regret – that was the last presidential election where I voted for a major party candidate for President. Soon after graduation I was reading about the economics of drug prohibition. I was convinced, by historical analogy with alcohol Prohibition in the ’20s and ’30s, for purely economic and pragmatic reasons, that the drug war is worse than drugs. I kept reading libertarian websites and later came to understand the moral reasons for liberty. I for awhile was a member of the Libertarian Party, though the extent of my involvement was to go to a couple of meetings and help a couple of local guys get petition signatures needed for them to appear on the ballot, this was in 2005 when I lived in upstate New York. I really didn’t see much chance of changing anything and contented myself with just having the kind of life I wanted to have. Shortly thereafter I took the opportunity to relocate closer to my family in Utah. I continued to read websites and articles about liberty, and have conversations with my family about the ideas of liberty. I think two of my brothers are mostly libertarian now because of these conversations, and my mother has moved in that direction a little too. I still didn’t see much chance of doing anything about the system.
One day, I was searching the internet and came across a radio show called Free Talk Live (unfortunately, I don’t remember when or how this happened, but I think it was some time after my father’s unexpected death in 2007), and Mark and Ian quickly interested me in an idea called the Free State Project. I read about it, and decided I might like to do it, but didn’t want to move to New Hampshire without seeing it first, so I determined to visit NH in June 2010 for the Porcupine Freedom Festival (PorcFest). My visit went very well. I enjoyed the campground and the agorist business environment was very nice. I also met a number of awesome people including Jason Sorens, Denis Goddard, Mark Warden, Jack Shimek, I believe Pete Eyre himself on the last day, and former Governor Gary Johnson. I also saw Gardner Goldsmith but I don’t think I actually spoke to him, and I coincidentally chose a night to see the FTL live show which was the night the Shire Society Declaration was brought out for people to sign, which I did. I also made a couple of friends from California, one of whom has moved to NH recently. On the trip, I had several joyful emotional moments, where the rightness of what I was doing just hit me, first when my plane was descending into Manchester. It was a cloudy day, but when getting fairly close to the ground, I recognized the city’s street grid pattern and knew I was in NH. The second time was when I saw my rental car’s license plate motto, Live Free or Die, and the third time when I arrived at Roger’s campground in Lancaster and saw the sign “Welcome Free State”. Even now thinking of those moments I can remember the feeling of being in the right place and knowing I’m doing something bigger than myself, doing something because it’s right not because it benefits me. I could make more money staying at my old store in Utah, and I would be close to my family. Utah and Colorado are still relatively free compared to a lot of other places in this country (well, Utah if you don’t consider some restrictions on personal freedom that don’t affect me personally).
This decision is kind of a continuation of my ancestor’s legacy of devotion to a cause, to be willing to leave everything in search of religious freedom, to leave families and businesses and cities that they knew they would never see again (it’s more like 2 years, not a lifetime for me), to walk across the country, many of them, with an undeveloped wilderness waiting for them. They were all activists for liberty, just that they were narrowly focused on religious liberty. It’s kind of analogous, what my Mormon pioneer ancestors did and what I’m doing (my wilderness is overcoming the pervasiveness of statist beliefs), though the causes are different and the direction of travel is in opposite directions. My trip is much less onerous, I will travel in a couple of days what took them months, but I still hope to keep that tradition of commitment, optimism and perseverance in the face of incredible opposition, and love of freedom alive.
Anyway, I know that moving to New Hampshire is the most important thing I could right now, and I eagerly look forward to my arrival there in less than two weeks. I hope to see many of you on the road or upon my arrival in the Free State.
Anyway, this post is long enough. I think I will post some more, about the caravan and my plans for the trip, sometime in the next couple of days, then the fun, the outreach, the travel, and the daily updates start on Wednesday. Look for it!
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