Mesh Enok
In order to quickly build a strong community from scratch within a limited territory, the following are required:
- Agreement among the community residents regarding the rules of interaction
- Agreement from the external environment to tolerate the creation of a community with its own internal rules in their neighborhood
To create a libertarian community on the scale of a full-fledged federal subject, even if it is a small one, it is necessary to have the ability to extend one’s own order to that federal subject. The population of the Pskov region is roughly half that of New Hampshire. If we assume that the mechanisms for spreading influence in the RF and the USA are the same, this means that for the stable success of a Russian FSP, 10,000 freestaters must relocate to the Pskov region.
Of course, in the RF, the project will face far more difficulties than in the USA because, although both are formally federations, the states have far more rights than the Russian federal subjects. Regions cannot change very many norms. While a region can reduce regional taxes, firstly, these are very small compared to federal taxes, and secondly, the region’s budget is deeply in deficit.
The Pskov region has one huge plus: it borders three countries: Estonia, Latvia, and Belarus; I cannot even say offhand if any other federal subject can boast anything similar. With a sufficiently wide network of trust formed by freestaters, this means the possibility of corrupting the structures that control the cross-border movement of goods and people, and consequently, international trade. This is something to think about.
In the Beautiful Russia of the Future, it is envisioned that a large number of powers will be transferred to the regions and taxes will be redistributed in their favor. This, combined with electoral deregulation, significantly simplifies the task of turning a conditional Pskov region into a kind of libertarian showcase.
Currently, most Russian libertarians are, of course, Muscovites, as they are on average wealthier, better involved in the information agenda through various offline actions, and simply understand that far more depends on them in our hyper-centralized country. Will they want to trade their significance in the capital for widespread fame in a small region? It is far from a fact, and certainly not all of them. After all, New Hampshire was already a fairly wealthy state at the very start of the FSP; I doubt the project would have been as successful if an absolute backwater, like American Samoa, had been chosen for it.
But did I publish articles about panarchy here for nothing? Territorial attachment matters less and less, so we are by no means obliged to obsess over clustering in one poor agricultural community, but can instead establish our own order around ourselves wherever we are, and on a global scale, this may mean more than one bright beacon of freedom against a backdrop of universal slavery.
