The poor slobs now have to sell you health care EVEN IF YOU ALREADY HAVE AN EXPENSIVE CONDITION

Now why, why would any more or less healthy person who is not expecting a baby sign up for health care? Pay the small fine, it's cheaper. Pay out-of-pocket for the one or two times you need to see a doctor or get a flu shot this year. It's still cheaper.

And if you find out that you have cancer, a heart condition, or (like myself) a chronic condition like ulcerative colitis which is going to require tens of thousands of dollars' worth of health care every year to manage... well, THEN sign up, and get the Gold option, and laugh at the clueless corporate fucks in the insurance industry who thought that getting into bed with the government and forcing everyone to buy their product, would actually result in moar profit...

Sanctions? Hardly necessary. To bring the US to its knees, all that needs to happen is for the Chinese to stop buying US Treasury bonds. Whoops....

You say this,. but it was a post on Slashdot 10 years ago that led me to move to New Hampshire. Now I pay no income or sales tax, am not legally required to buckle myself up in the car, can own any knife I damn well please, don't need a "permit" for a gun, can marry another man if I wanted to, and soon will have access to medicinal marijuana.

Go down and click my sig. Real shit happens in the real world, and you bet your ass it sometimes happens as a result of a slashdot post.

I'm interested in the private prison data, and will look into it. As I said, I'm not convinced and perhaps that data will help make up my mind.

ALEC has a lot of 'legislative' code, not all of which I agree with... but some I do. I also don't install every package in Debian, just what I want... different strokes for different folks. ALEC advocates a perspective. Sometimes I agree, sometimes not.

As for minimum wages laws, basic economics shows why minimum wages are broken and wrong. Pick up some Austrian economic books, and prepare to change your worldview.

The value of the dollar is dropping for many reasons, and minimum wage is one of those reasons... You have cause and effect reversed... the elderly having to go out is BECAUSE of the minimum wage, not in spite of it.

And my 'basic assumptions' are that force is wrong, that individuals make better decisions than government agents can make for them, that the right to contract, the right to property, and the right to control your own body are paramount rights...
Libertarians start with principles, and arrive at solutions that follow from principles. Sadly, few other political views do, they get 'ideas' about what is right, and then to try put the square pegs into the round holes...

I am in favor of marijuana legislation, yes, and sponsored a few bills in that vein, and support pretty much all of the 5 or 6 bills this year in NH to do something (medical, decrim, tax/regulate, industrial hemp (prime sponsor on one), and reducing criminal charges (prime on that one)

  I'm also against both war and capital punishment.

As for minimum wage laws, pensions, food stamps, and all of the rest, you are right, you wouldn't want to vote for me, I want to end Social Security, as it's a pyramid scheme, and you want it to continue, because you are about to cash in on it.

There is a fundamental natural right to practice a vocation. But Right to Work laws are even more simple: You do not have the right to force someone else to pay you for the privilege of having his job, and despite that forced unionism is supposed to be over, the 'fair share' dues requires are the same in a different name. Just because 80% or 90% of the workers choose to organize, the remaining folks should be _forced_ to go along.

I don't hate Unions, I think RTW makes unions EARN their place, by making it so the only people who pay for them WANT to pay for them, making them get better and be worthwhile.

And I'm against the PATRIOT Act, etc...

So, despite that you wouldn't vote for me, plenty of others would. I'm a Republican in the vein of Ron Paul... and so far, he's doing quite well. (And while I disagree in minor ways with him, he's the only major politician confronting the problems that _your_ generation has caused, sir.

1) Infrastructure
At my house in rural Hopkinton, NH, I reliably get 8MB down/4MB up. I telecommute to work most days; I live and die by my fast and reliable internet connection. I have had no particular issues. Note that I choose to live in the woods; there are in fact cities (not metropileses, but places with tall buildings and hundreds of thousands of people) in NH: Manchester, Nashua, etc

2) "recording cops"
Yes, FSPers have been pushing legislation to clarify that people have the right to record on-duty civil servants (especially police). Separately, a number of court cases have been won (by FSPer lawyers) that have adjudicated that on-duty police have no reasonable expectation of privacy. So, it's an issue that a number of FSPers are pushing on hard.

3) Downside
Yes, it gets cold in winter. And butt-hot in the summer. And the closest Really Big City is Boston, which is about an hour away from the NH state capitol in Concord. Oh, and there's no income or sales tax, so if you really want to pay those, NH will suck for you.

While true, from a perspective of 20,000 feet, while it's quasi-open, it's still essentially a proprietary solution, in that you can't share it, can't leverage other eyeballs, other states, other voices... it's better than some, worse than others (you broke it, you own both pieces, despite paying for it and thus getting the code)

I don't see a problem with it, but why single it out and perhaps encourage it?

Yes. This is part of the thinking we need people to understand... the long term.