Ten ways to make a political difference

Ten ways to be an effective political activist, in a roughly decreasing order of importance:

1. Be prepared to vote with your feet. Add interstate and international diversity to your social networks -- both personal and business. Lower your costs of exiting, if the need should arise, the jurisdictions that impose on the territories wherein you reside. Repeatedly in history -- from the old American frontier to the fall of the Berlin Wall to modern jurisdictions that specialize in international trade -- low exit costs have not only enabled liberty for the individual and the small group, but they have more than any other factor motivated the larger jurisdiction to provide the most important rights and freedoms for those who stay put. Grow interpolitical roots so that no single polity can chop down your tree. The good news is that modern communications, travel, and standardization of international languages (mostly on English) have made diversifying our social networks -- growing international roots -- far easier than ever before in history.


2. Influence our law in action. Serve on a jury and insist on protecting those who have not been proven to harm or intend to harm another.

3. Make your own law. For starters draft your own contracts, wills, prenuptial agreements, and property deeds. Even better if you can do this as a service for other people, but for that you will generally need to be a member of the appropriate legal guild. To draft law usefully, whether for yourself or others, you will need to learn the real law they don't normally teach in public schools: contracts, property, trusts and estates, and torts for starters, or else (often a second best choice to learning law yourself) retain the services of a sympathetic lawyer. Learn actual law -- don't turn into a whacko running around putting liens on other people's property based on interpretations of the UCC quite remote from what any judge would contemplate. But do start to make your own law. You cannot be free if you cannot make your own law.

4. Influence our law in action. Donate to or get involved with the Institute for Justice and other organizations of politically and legally savvy people defending our most important rights and freedoms in the courts.

5. Make your own law: use strong security to protect the people, relationships, property, and data you value. Learn to defend yourself and your loved ones with weaponry. Write and use cryptography, smart contracts, bit gold, digital cash, and other security protocols made possible by computer science.

6. Tell us about your good research and good ideas: write a blog, comment on a blog, write papers.

7. Start a multinational small business.

8. Vote with your pocketbook -- buy and sell the goods, services, stocks
and bonds that promote liberty, and boycott those that promote its
violation.

9. Get involved in a lobbying group or political campaign where you can make a difference: usually a local campaign, but on rare occasions a national one.

10. Vote for and against politicians, but don't be fooled -- of all these
ten ways to make a political difference, voting in a political election makes the
least difference.