About a week ago Jason told y’all that I was joining the team here at Fr33Agents.com. I’m really looking forward to being part of such a powerhouse of liberty-oriented bloggers but first I thought it’d be good to share a little background about myself as it’ll influence my future posts.

As was noted, I recently left my gig at Bureaucrash. It was not an easy decision but one I felt compelled to take as I believe the projects that I’m now working on — the Motorhome Diaries and Fr33 Agents — are the best opportunities I have to further the freedom movement. I valued my time at Bureaucrash — both because I believe we (the many awesome crashers and I) did solid work and because I developed some real friendships with many principled, creative, and inspiring individuals (some of whom will soon be joining me as a blogger here on Fr33Agents.com).

I first made it to DC in Jan. of 2005 as an intern at Cato in Foreign Policy and Defense. That summer I was a Koch Fellow placed at the Drug Policy Alliance after which I was hired on at the at the Institute for Humane Studies. My last gig at IHS found me working as the director of their Campus Network program, for which the two main goal were to:

• provide resources (intellectual,  financial, networks, etc.) to liberty-oriented students and organizations
• grow the pipeline of open-minded students into IHS’s great line-up of seminars and scholarships

I traveled to Boston, Chicago, Philly, NYC, VA, NC and elsewhere and was able to meet with and learn from some really high-caliber students. The impact these trips had — developing a personal relationship, sharing ideas and resources, etc. — cannot be understated and is one of the major reasons I believe the Motorhome Diaries will be successful.

The second question I asked each student (after what had turned them onto the ideas of librety) was what websites they visited most-frequently. The most-common response was either cato.org, lewrockwell.com or mises.org. I bring this up as my fellow-Fr33Agent.com blogger Greg recently went on the offensive against the Mises Institute.

Why? Because it’s not worth continuing these tired ad hominem attacks.

I’m not asking Greg (or anyone else) to drop all critiques of fellow-libertarians and start goose-stepping to some sort of conformity,  but I do think it important to step back from the fray and consider where it’s best to allocate our scarce resources — to continue levelingl personal attacks, which then become self-fulfilling prophecies or to focus on our comparative advantages to more-effectively advance the freedom movement?

Jason and I just left beautiful Keene, NH, which we’ve dubbed the hotbed of libertarian activism (and which Ian Freeman of Free Talk Live describes as the libertarian media capital of the world). It’s clear that these activists have already had an impact in their community, changing minds one at a time while advocating for a voluntary society. I’d hope that Greg and those at Cato and Mises would grant that it’s great that these individuals are advancing the freedom movement through activism just as those activists would likely cede that it’s a good thing that those at Cato and Mises act as they best see fit.

It’s a great thing that individuals and organizations are trying a wide variety of tactics because it means that there are more chances of success. If we put all our resources into the think tank model or into any other model our ability to wage the ideas and culture war lessen dramatically. Instead of admonishing those in our ranks for not taking exactly the same approach as we do, give them credit when it’s due just as you hold them to task for tactics you deem as erroneous, which is why I’m glad to be at Fr33Agents.com, where we strive to do just that.