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By David Millward, Keene, New Hampshire

3:48PM GMT 20 Nov 2014

Nirvana for a libertarian in New Hampshire is a gay married couple guarding a stash of marijuana with an AK47.

“I could live with that,” said Ian Freeman, a leading light of the Free State Project and one of the pathfinders in a mass migration of like-minded people to the New England state.

He left Florida and moved to New Hampshire to push the libertarian agenda in a state whose motto is “Live free or die” - one of more than 1,600 to have done so.

They are the first tranche of 16,000 people who have pledged to up sticks and make the state a “beacon of liberty”.

Depending on one’s point of view the Free State Project is just a logical extension of the libertarian tradition, or a bunch of disruptive anarchists who have taken a perverse pleasure in niggling the authorities.


Mr Freeman, 34, hosts a radio show which is syndicated around the country. He is also ran for governor on behalf of the New Hampshire Liberty Party.

The Free State Project was founded more than a decade ago by Jason Sorens, who was studying for a doctorate at Yale at the time.

His dream was to trigger a mass migration of 20,000 libertarians to a state with a small population by early 2016.

The idea was to follow the example of the Mormon migration to Utah in the mid 19th century.

A number of states including Maine,Wyoming, Vermont and Alaska were considered as candidates for the movement before supporters decided on New Hampshire.

The granite state, which has no sales tax or income tax - though property taxes are high - was the overwhelming choice.

“We want to create a society where the maximum role of Government is the protection of life, liberty and property,” Mr Freeman told the Telegraph.

“I like the idea of the natural law of supply and demand. I don’t have a problem with laws which say you should not harm anybody else.”

But other laws should go.

“There are reams and reams of statutes which nobody can get through. I do have a real problem with restrictions on alcohol and drugs.”

It would be easy to dismiss the libertarians as eccentric, if there were not so many of them and if the belief in small government did not resonate with a sizeable chunk of American voters.