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Within any organization there will occasionally arise differences of opinion, not only concerning the best means to achieving the organization's goals, but also the identification of those goals themselves. In this article I offer my interpretation of what our own organization's mission was and is.

The Free Nation Foundation takes its origin from two observations:

First, the number of people who would move to or invest in a libertarian nation, were one to exist and appear stable, is very high.

Second, every attempt so far to establish a libertarian nation has ended in utter failure.

Neither of these observations may seem very remarkable by itself. But the two observations are surprising when conjoined. The first observation indicates a high demand for our product; the second indicates that the product is a very hard sell. The former is difficult to explain, given the latter; and vice versa.

Now when two observations are difficult to reconcile, there are two possible strategies. One is to decide that at least one of the observations is mistaken. The other is to accept both observations and look for some special hypothesis that will explain their coexistence.

One might try the first strategy here. Maybe one of the two observations is simply wrong. Now the prospects for challenging the second observation are meager; so a proponent of this strategy would most likely challenge the first observation. The demand for a free nation has been overestimated.

Is this a plausible answer? I don't think so. The evidence for the first observation is pretty overwhelming. All around the world, refugees are desperately seeking political asylum or economic opportunity in relatively freemarket countries-in many cases risking their lives in order to cross the border. Likewise, freeports and low-tax:, low-regulation havens remain popular with investors.

The second strategy, then, seems more promising. High demand does ex- ist, but for some reason that demand does not translate into support for free nation projects. If that is true, we need a hypothesis to explain why.

FNF was founded, in 1993, on such a hypothesis. Rich Hammer's hypothesis was that no free nation project to date had succeeded in achieving credibility, even among its potential investors and settlers-indeed, even among diehard libertarians themselves.

The purpose of FNF was conceived as being to do what it could to promote such credibility. Previous free nation 1 projects had never been recognized as I legitimate by the states who were their prospective neighbors. (Many libertarians will recall the story of the founders of the Republic of Minerva being chased off their homesteaded coral atoll by the King of Tonga.) Without such legitimacy, a free nation's future is too pre- carious to attract settlers or investors. The problem is not low demand for a free nation; the problem is that free nation projects have (quite justifiably) been seen as unlikely to be reliable in meeting that demand.

So if legitimacy is crucial to the success of free nation projects, what would induce neighboring states to grant such legitimacy? Well, we could convert the rulers to libertarianism. Or we could pay them a lot of money.

Clearly, the second option seems more likely to succeed than the first. But free nation advocates don't have a lot of money. Why don't we? There are surely plenty of wealthy investors who recognize how lucrative it would be to invest in a free nation. So why aren't they bankrolling our free nation projects?

The answer, once again, is credibility. When investors invest in a project, they want to see a proposal for how the project is going to work. The free nation movement has had a dearth of specific, clear, and detailed proposals for designing the founding institutions of a free nation. Therefore, it seems reasonable for prospective free nation founders to develop a set of proposals. And since we know that competition is a discovery procedure, the best way to do this would seem to be, not to have one single person write up the proposals, but to have many different libertarian thinkers contribute a variety of different proposals. Hence the need for a think tank devoted to this task.

As our initial prospectus (Rich's essay Toward A Free Nation) makes clear, this is the job that FNF was founded to do. It was never imagined that the job would be an easy one. Without the resources of the major professional think tanks, FNF would have to rely, in the early stages at least, on volunteer spare-time labor, with all the perils to timeliness, professionalism, and quantity of production that such a limitation implies. Still, it seemed a job worth , attempting; and so it still seems to me.

In his article "The Free Nation Foundation Workplan: Review and Revision" (this issue) Phil has raised a number of objections to the Foundation's I original mission. I think we who support that original mission should wel1 come these objections, for they identify genuine problems and dangers that the implementation of that mission might face. They deserve our serious attention. That is why, in my opinion, it can be a very healthy thing for an organization to have members who criticize its goals.

But I do not think that our response to Phil' s criticisms should be to despair of FNF's original vision. Are the problems he points to important? Absolutely. Are they insuperable? I am not convinced of that.

I shall not attempt a full reply to Phil's objections here. But let me just note a few points that might give us rea- son not to lose confidence too quickly.

Phil worries about the stability of the regime. What is to guarantee that either the original founders or the new immigrants will not twist the free nation' s institutions to promote their own political agendas? As Phil points out, "mere words in a constitution" will not protect against such a result. I quite agree. But constitutional design is not just a matter of writing lists of "Government shall" and "Government shall not." It is above all a matter of creating a political structure that will tend to give those within it stronger incentives to support the regime than to undermine it. Immanuel Kant said that a political system should be designed so that it would work even for a nation of demons. I think Kant made the mistake of underestimating the importance of social and cultural context to the functioning of political institutions. But overestimating that importance would be a mistake as well. The very same population will act quite differently if placed in a different political structure. People will use whichever political mechanisms are easiest to use, and those are the ones most readily available; and which ones those are will influence the result. And political mechanisms in turn tend to influence cultural development; it's a two-way street. Conservatives often moan that the influx of immigrants into the U.S. has undermined traditional American values. But I cannot see that immigrants have had any such affect. Most of the changes, both good and bad, have been brought about by coalitions of long-established U.S. natives. Moreover, the damage that the power-hungry can do will depend on what sorts of check-and- balance mechanisms are in place.

If the free nation collapses into civil war, I do not count on UN recognition to save it. Once genuine civil war erupts it is probably doomed, and certainly the UN is unlikely to stand up for a libertarian regime. (I think of recognition by neighboring countries as valuable primarily with regard to the free nation's international disputes, not its domestic ones.) The trick is to try to develop institutions that will minimize the likelihood of civil war arising in the first place. Past issues of Formulations have treated this subject many times. More work needs to be done. But I am skeptical of Phil's suggestion that the task is impossible. It is difficult, certainly; but it is worth the attempt.

I also do not agree with Phil's implication (though it may be one of the few points on which Phil and Rich agree!) that FNF's original vision was simply an idiosyncratic preference of Rich's, that few other FNF participants ever shared. Certainly the vision originated with Rich, and was promoted and sustained by him with tireless dedication. But a survey of past issues of Formulations will show that not only Rich's and my contributions, but the vast majority of others' contributions as well, were written within the framework of the "FNF Workplan" or something close to it. (Phil's articles have been an exception, but I've always regarded those articles as an invaluable contribution to the FNF Workplan nonetheless-partly by providing needed criticism and feedback, and partly by identifying sociological principles and insights that free nation founders should find enormously useful. ) I for one do not agree that FNF's original mission "does not appear to have support within FNF at this time." Phil has come to bury the FNF Workplan and not to praise it-but the patient is still alive and kicking.

We welcome debate.

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