Colt Manufacturing Company Moving to... Texas

Pardon the vague headline -- I can't tell from this article if the company in question is a licensee of Colt, or a branch of Colt, or some sort of corporate entity affiliated with Colt.

Point is, whatever they are, they make AR-15s under the Colt name. And they're moving to Texas.

The move by Colt Competition into Breckenridge comes as the CEO of Colt Manufacturing in Connecticut has said there will soon be few good answers to keep his company in the state. Connecticut passed some of the nation’s most restrictive gun laws this week.

It also comes weeks after Governor Rick Perry reportedly sent letters to gun companies, encouraging them to move to Texas. Perry sent a message on Twitter to Colorado company Magpul as recently as March 21, saying “Come on Down to Texas.” The Governor’s office did not confirm Friday if it had sent a recruitment letter to Colt Competition.

This goes beyond the 2nd Amendment. Texas is attracting companies because it's offering economic freedom. And it goes beyond that, too: This is about a fundamental dispute about whether our government exists to serve us and get out of the way of our exercise of our own free initiative, or whether government exists to instruct us and limit us as if we were schoolchildren in their care, permitted only to do the things the agreed to by a consensus of ill-educated moral scolds.

It's also about pluralism vs. monoculture. Liberal Connecticut would certainly like to imagine itself as the pluralistic society, and Texas as the monoculture, but in fact that's backwards. As Connecticut (and the various other former democracies of the east) claim that a "social consensus" has now been reached, politically, on a great many "issues" previously not thought to be political in nature at all, and more and more establishes an Official State Position on every question a Free Man might have, with those disagreeing with the party orthodoxy punished, or at least burdened, by official state sanction.

Meanwhile, Texas permits people to be as largely free.

Which means they're free to be weird. I don't mean this word as negatively as it's usually used. I use "weird" to mean any position that deviates from the widely-agreed to provincial orthodoxy. I'm sure gun manufacturers and gun owners and gun enthusiasts appear plenty weird to the Neo-Liberal majority of soft-thinking Connecticutans.

One question that's never gone away in all of history is what does society do about those who disagree with the prevailing social mores? Does it allow such "weirdoes" to go about their business without interference, or does it bring the various powers of the majority consensus -- social disapproval, formal laws burdening or prohibiting dissident conduct and opinions -- to push the dissenters towards the majority line?

One thing that annoys me about capital-L libertarians: They continue talking up the threat to Dissidents being equal from both political poles, without ever noticing that the threats from the Right are largely defanged due to judicial law-making (taking many rightist threats to liberty off the Constitutional table entirely) or due to simple political unpopularity of them.

Meanwhile, the Left's assault on liberty is growing and fully sanctioned by the state. It's an ascending star (a dark star, mind you), not a fading one.

The parties are not "equal" when it comes to threats to liberty. There are those on the right who have strong Nannying tendencies, but they could not muster the political support for their Nannyist tendencies, nor could those tendencies survive scrutiny by the US courts, which are ever-vigilant against threats to liberty which come from the right (and hardly mindful at all of those which come from the left-- ObamaCare's a tax, remember?).

When liberals feel oppressed by laws pushed by the right, they get them overturned by the courts. In some cases, they actually garner the public support enough to end such laws by actual democratic action.

And when conservatives feel oppressed by liberty-restricting laws from the left?

Our only realistic alternative seems to be to physically relocate ourselves to a more-free jurisdiction.

The Magnetic Attraction of the Future: supercore references Heinlein's gonzo-libertarian moon colony:

8 Can we colonize Luna already?

I was having trouble expressing what I was trying to express, but this helps me get there. The appeal of Texas, to me, isn't that it's Southern. I'm a Northern Yankee. Southern culture is alien to me.

But what Texas (and other forward-thinking states) are doing is implementing a culture of The Future, as opposed to the decaying states' culture of the Past.

The future is always exciting.

But in Connecticut, as in many of the big liberal states, the year is always 1974.

I don't want to live in 1974 forever. It was bad enough the first time.

The pull of the future is hard to resist. And I'm getting that Future Gravity vibe from Texas.

Meanwhile, There's California: California used to occupy an outsized place in the collective imagination as being a the State of the Future.

No one believes that anymore. California's growing more dystopian. No one ever has anything good to say about California politics or society, the things man makes. It's always about the weather.

There are Numbers and Logic and then there is the Imagination and the Heart. I think many of the former States of the Future (California most of all) have been coasting on a 30-year-old reputation of which it is simply no longer deserving. The Numbers and Logic have been against California for a while, but it's continued to exist as the State of the Future in the imagination and in the heart. That's the place where it really counts.

I see that changing. (Why? Because it just changed in me. Hey, we're all solipsistic, at least a little bit.)

Mike the Moose on The Past:

You know I've lived here in Cali, most of my life. I've watched it over the decades of that life piss away the residual prosperity it had from the gold industry, and the oil industry, and in my lifetime the computation Industry. Every cent of the money from three of the most significant economic booms this nation has ever seen....gone.

You imagine an America without conservative states as a boon, because of the fading glory of now progressive strongholds make them look good on paper today. Like Havisham still dressed in the nuptial gown, staring at a rotted feast and disintegrating linens, you imagine the celebration is still real the party still going on, because the house hasn't fallen down yet, because the decayed vestiges still in form resemble the glory of yesteryear close enough that you can imagine the greatness of the fading moment in the sun. But progressive states are the run down and crumbling mansions of greatness long past. Rotted out by progressivism, just waiting to collapse of their own accord.

Exactly the sort of vibe I'm getting. You can't live long on reputation alone. You do have to periodically innovate and adapt.

I'm not seeing that in the decaying states. They continue partying like it's 1974.

posted by Ace at 02:29 PM

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