If New Hampshire were to leave the union and no longer be one of the ‘Divided States‘ of America, would our state be better off? Would it even survive? After all, it receives millions of dollars each year from the federal government and the state only has 1.3 million people! There is no way it could survive on its own. Even if it did, would its citizens’ quality of life improve if the U.S. government was no longer in their lives?
Originally published on The Liberty Block, the following is a guest post by Alu Axleman, which represents the personal opinions of the author, and not necessarily that of the Foundation.
1) No more federal taxes
Currently, the state of New Hampshire has no general income tax or sales tax. The average property tax for a home is around $5,000 in New Hampshire. In addition to property taxes, the average worker might pay roughly $1,000 in sales taxes per year on food and other small expenditures. Comparatively, the average New Hampshire worker may have around $15,000 stolen from them each year by the federal government via ‘income taxes’. Federal gas taxes, federal payroll taxes, and all of the other federal taxes, could push that figure well above $30,000 or even $40,000 annually. If New Hampshire left the union, workers could expect to save $15,000-$40,000 per year right off the bat. What could you do with that kind of money each year? Help your aging parents? Upgrade your home or car? Buy those firearms (and ammo and accessories) you’ve been longing for? Take your loved ones on a vacation?
2) No more gun laws
Considering New Hampshire has no restrictions on firearms, accessories, or ammunition (yes, it’s almost as if ‘anarchy’ isn’t as dangerous as your public school teacher made it out to be), all of the many gun laws that Granite Staters are forced to obey only come from D.C. Once New Hampshire secedes, all of those unconstitutional, illegal, immoral, ineffective, anti-freedom laws disappear. Get ready to enjoy fully automatic guns, suppressors, SBRs, and anything else you can imagine, and forget about ever needing to fill out NICS forms, tax stamps, or any other type of permission slip from politicians before obtaining firearms! Imagine – you could shoulder a brace and sell a short shotgun without worrying about the ATF killing you.
3) No more federally-funded police state
One of the many ways that politicians and ‘law enforcement’ officials in New Hampshire terrorize, control, extort, and abuse us is by utilizing federal ‘grants‘ to obtain tools that make tyranny much more effective. Among such tools are the BEARcats and other military vehicles that police in New Hampshire have been given by the U.S. government. The U.S. government also gives money to law enforcement agencies in New Hampshire and many other states for the express purpose of establishing suspicionless sobriety checkpoints. Most recently, the Portsmouth police were given seven new drones by the federal government. Remaining in the ‘Socialist Authoritarian State of America’ also allows federal agents to establish immigration checkpoints anywhere they desire in New Hampshire whenever they want to. As with sobriety checkpoints, these suspicionless searches violate natural rights to freedom and privacy and violate the U.S. and N.H. Constitutional protections of those rights. These illegal checkpoints all go away once we leave the union. While police in New Hampshire should do the right thing and refuse the federal (read: taxpayer) money, wouldn’t you love to see that temptation be removed?
4) Federal Department of Education
The U.S. government extorts money from individuals and uses $70 billion each year to mandate exactly how nearly every child must be taught. The Federal Department of Education is perhaps the biggest contributor to the decline in the academic success, economic success, culture, and freedom in the U.S. since its establishment in 1980. Parents in New Hampshire are currently part of the small number of parents in the U.S. who can still legally educate their own children. Within the coming years, the U.S. government will make it 100% mandatory that every child attend a government-operated school. Once that happens, do you want to be part of the U.S. or do you want to have the ability to ignore the ridiculous law that would be irrelevant to your sovereign nation?
5) Federal Reserve
The U.S. government currently allows the Federal Reserve to control monetary policy via complicated maneuvers, which include setting the interest rates that apply to the US government and nearly all banks in the U.S. The Federal Reserve’s board members are appointed by the president, but they enjoy the privilege of functioning as a ‘non-governmental’ entity, which allows them to be nearly 100% unaccountable to voters. The Federal Reserve may be the biggest reason that the U.S. is currently $22 trillion in debt. The Federal Reserve and the U.S. government also oppose alternative/competing currencies. Being that New Hampshire is the cryptocurrency capital of the U.S., it is inevitable that the U.S. government will begin to attack New Hampshire for allowing its people to use the currency of their choice.
6) National ID
Within a year, New Hampshire citizens will be forced by the U.S. government to obtain a national ID card if they wish to continue to fly domestically without a passport. Within a few more years, everyone in the U.S. will be forced by D.C. politicians to obtain a ‘REAL ID‘, regardless of whether they want to use airplanes. While such a federal law might seem benign to some, nationalizing yet another significant institution would be one more large step towards the politicians’ goal: A singular American state.
7) Perpetual foreign interventionism
Millions of people – perhaps billions of people throughout the world, believe that peace and an end to perpetual war is the most important issue facing humanity. Tulsi Gabbard is the most popular candidate on the Democratic side in the U.S., and among many Americans, largely because she loudly condemns the culture of perpetual foreign interventionism. I used to support the military and all it does abroad; however I am beginning to consider that maybe some foreign people do resent Americans because ‘our’ (read: the politicians’) military has been occupying their land and abusing them for decades. If the U.S. military maintains a presence in 185 countries, maybe we’ve gone too far. If we have been fighting the ‘war on terror‘ against a few primitive terrorists in the Middle East for 20 years with few signs of winning or slowing down, maybe the U.S. politicians don’t really have an interest in winning. As George Orwell famously said, “The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.” As a sovereign nation, we could choose to have a truly defensive military and we would be free to create our own alliances.
8) Domestic surveillance
Between the NSA, CIA, FBI, and hundreds of other federal agencies, the U.S. government conducts massive amounts of illegal spying on innocent individuals. Over the past few years, Americans have largely realized that the government is a serious threat to our privacy. Americans have lost a ton of faith in these once-respected agencies. Do you enjoy being forced to pay politicians and their agents to spy on you and other innocent civilians? If not, you should support New Hampshire secession.
9) Civil asset forfeiture
While nearly everyone in the United States strongly condemns civil asset forfeiture once they learn what it is, few people know that it is a federal program. If not for the U.S. government, it would not exist. Civil asset forfeiture is the federal law which allows government agents to extra-judicially confiscate any property (money, drugs, guns, cars, houses, etc.) from people who have not been convicted of any crime. A person could have his property stolen by government agents without even being charged with a crime. When a Texas state senator proposed a bill that would require a person to be convicted before police could steal his property, President Trump and Sheriff Harold Eavenson openly discussed whether to ‘destroy his career‘. The U.S. government justifies this blatant theft by arguing that if any type of property may be connected to a crime in the past, present, or future, law enforcement should be able to seize it as soon as possible in order to prevent the suspect from committing additional crimes with the property. The U.S. government extended permission to state and local police to participate in this program – as long as they share their spoils with the Feds. They call it ‘equitable sharing’. Cops have utilized this tyrannical law to confiscate houses on the grounds that the homeowner’s teenage grandson may have once sold a bit of cannabis to a friend on the property. Police regularly use ‘civil asset forfeiture’ to steal whatever they desire, from drugs, to guns, to cars.
10) IRS
As is the case with many federal agencies, the IRS can use its power to target its political enemies. Under President Obama, the IRS unfairly targeted conservative groups. The abuse was so severe that even Obama’s IRS director admitted to it. As social media, technology, government surveillance, and data collection of individuals in the U.S. increase, it would seem entirely realistic that the IRS could target individuals as well as groups with unfair scrutiny and punishments. Do you want to remain in the union when the Warren-Castro administration directs the IRS to target pro-freedom individuals like yourself? I sure as hell don’t.
11) Economic regulation
A thriving, prosperous economy is the most important priority to many individuals. Those who have engaged in any type of business understand that the best thing for a society’s economy is lack of government restrictions. It’s the reason that our economy quickly became the best in the world. It’s the reason that New Hampshire’s economy is infinitely better than New York’s. It’s the reason that Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Switzerland, Australia, Ireland, and Japan, are booming while North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela struggle.
President Obama utilized the mass hysteria caused by global warming propaganda to pass 4,000 new environmental laws. The EPA is only one example of politicians using regulations to destroy economies. When constituents become too prosperous, they threaten the government due to their increasing independence, weaponry, and overall influence. Therefore, politicians often seek to worsen economies and then swoop in and ‘save the day’ with yet another taxpayer-funded welfare program. Obama’s damage to the U.S. economy was so severe that the number of Americans requiring food stamps (ultra-poor) increased from 34 million to 44 million during his presidency. Politicians love having an excuse to increase welfare programs. It makes them appear very generous.
Regulations imposed by the FDA harm the economy and our health. Run by politicians and their cronies, the FDA regularly chooses winners and losers in the health and pharmaceutical industries. Many people remain unaware that the FDA was likely the primary reason for the massive EpiPen scandal of 2016. Due to their corrupt, strict requirements, it takes an average of 2.5 billion dollars and 12 years to bring a new medication to the market. This is not the case in other countries. No wonder companies have to charge a fortune for their medications! And we are forced to pay $4 billion every year to fund the agency.
Politicians since the inception of the US have passed seemingly infinite amounts of restrictions, each of which makes the economy more difficult to navigate. Now that politicians have illegally appointed unaccountable bureaucrats to do the dirty work for them, regulations are being created more than ever before. Depending on the estimate, federal regulations on businesses cost Americans around $2 trillion every year. Once New Hampshire separates from D.C., our economy – which is currently the best in the U.S. – would certainly improve dramatically.
12) Activists’ time, money, & resources
While it’s probably impossible to calculate exactly how much time and money New Hampshire’s passionate liberty activists spend on federal issues and candidates, we are certain that it’s significant. Every two years, pro-freedom activists in New Hampshire spend a lot of time and money on the state’s two U.S. House races. They always come up short, but even if they were successful in electing the ‘better’ congressional candidate, the U.S. Congress would remain largely unchanged. Even if New Hampshire could miraculously elect two Massies, the U.S. House would still be controlled by around 430 authoritarian socialists. The same goes for the U.S. Senate races and presidential elections.
Unfortunately, many activists in New Hampshire do not yet understand the multiple reasons that federal politics is a lost cause. If you think that New Hampshire’s domestic politics is teeter-tottering right now between good and evil (Democrats do win roughly half of the state’s elections) imagine how much better the state would be once we formally separate from D.C. Those millions of man-hours and the millions of dollars wasted by great liberty activists would begin to be used only on elections that occur inside of New Hampshire, like the race for governor, state house, state senate, executive council, and local races. The anti-freedom voters and politicians would begin losing so badly that they might deport themselves from New Hampshire to anti-freedom states like Massachusetts.
Any individual who lives in New Hampshire and values freedom and prosperity or who distrusts the politicians from D.C. should support the notion of New Hampshire governing itself. Such a declaration would free this great state from the control of people like Trump, Clinton, Obama, Bush, McConnell, Pelosi, Schumer, and the like. Leaving the union would also improve the quality of life for New Hampshire’s residents in nearly every way. Citizens of a sovereign New Hampshire would enjoy keeping thousands more dollars of their own income each year. They would enjoy defending themselves without any federal infringements on their self-defense tools and accessories. New Hampshire would thrive once free from the trillions of dollars worth of economic regulations established by D.C. politicians. If you want to be free from the corrupt central government that spends trillions on foreign interventions, forces you to pay for the massive amounts of welfare programs and unconstitutional agencies, and makes you a criminal for buying a firearm, talk to your legislator about New Hampshire independence today!
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