On Wednesday, a gaggle of libertarian-minded reformers hoping to take over an unsuspecting state and remold it in their live-and-let-live image under something called the Free State Project issued a progress report.

Presumably swayed by that “Live Free Or Die” business on New Hampshire license plates, the FSP membership had voted to select the Granite State as the “winner” in a scheme to conduct what has been billed as “the biggest experiment in democracy since the Revolutionary War.” The grand plan of the revolutionaries calls for the recruitment by the year 2006 of 20,000 like-minded souls (5,300 reportedly have already signed on) who would have five years to move to Maine’s back yard and begin fomenting their utopian fantasy.

Well, there goes the neighborhood, you’re probably thinking. And you may be right. Still, that giant exhaling sound you heard after the announcement was one colossal sigh of relief emanating from the state of Maine, which, thank God for huge favors, finished in sixth place in the voting on the list of 10 sparsely populated states the carpetbaggers had targeted as ripe for regime change. To ultimately be scorned as unworthy of a suitor’s advances is not necessarily a bad thing, as we’ve learned from other dubious lashups hatched to save us from ourselves here in the bucolic outback.

This time, we didn’t draw the short straw wherein it pertains to reformers from away unable to stifle the impulse to re-educate us in the proper way to live. Let New Hampshire have The Great Experiment, thank you very much. We’ll just keep the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard – and the state income taxes from New Hampshire workers employed there – and call things even.

New Hampshire’s Gov. Craig Benson, a Republican suspected by the state’s Democrats of being terminally naive, gushed at the prospect of 20,000 Free Staters accepting his invitation to commandeer his state as a laboratory for tinkering with the system. “I am excited they are for the rule of law, against prejudice and eager to be engaged in the political process,” Benson said upon hearing the news of the FSP selection. “As with all new citizens, I expect they will be positive contributors to New Hampshire, and I welcome them…”

Not so, said New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Kathy Sullivan, who has called the Free State Project, “the sort of fringe group that can best be described as anarchists.” In a story in Thursday’s Portsmouth Herald, Sullivan questioned Benson’s welcoming of the group. “Is Craig Benson for legalized prostitution?” she asked. “He’s for legalizing drugs? Is he for eliminating public schools? He doesn’t understand what these people stand for…”

What they stand for, and what they plan to do once established in New Hampshire, is pretty straightforward, according to the group’s Internet Web site. The laundry list of possibilities includes repeal of state taxes and wasteful government programs. The end of collaboration between state and federal law enforcement officials in enforcing unconstitutional laws. Rollback of laws pertaining to gun control and drug prohibition. The end of asset forfeiture and abuses of eminent domain. The privatization of utilities and the elimination of inefficient regulations and monopolies. And, bottom line, use of their political leverage to “negotiate appropriate political autonomy for our state…”

Talk about the consequences of letting the camel thrust its nose under the tent flap. The ink is barely dry on the press release announcing New Hampshire’s great good fortune and already the interlopers are talking about “our state.”

The reasons for pinning the Libertarian tail on the New Hampshire donkey are obvious, according to FSP vice president Elizabeth McKinstry. “The state boasts the lowest state and local tax burden in the continental U.S., the leanest state government in the country in terms of spending and employment, a citizen legislature, a healthy job market, and, perhaps most important, local support for our movement,” she said.

A survey by the group reportedly showed that 50 percent of the potential invading visionaries – who refer to themselves as “porcupines” because of their prickly nature in defending personal freedoms – have college degrees, 18 percent of them having done post-graduate work. Some 75 percent of them are under the age of 50, and 38 percent are between ages 18 and 34. Nearly half earn $60,000 or more per year.

Young, well-educated, upwardly mobile Peter Porcupine meets aging, crafty down-home Wiley Coyote for control of the hills of New Hampshire. Sounds like a swell plot for a Roadrunner cartoon. Beep beep. Which one do you suppose is most likely to get flattened into the pavement on the road to utopia before the comedy ends?

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.