Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

David Stewart, resident of one of my favorite cities, posted some thoughts on an interesting dilemma currently faced by the European Union:

The problem is that at the moment the Europe of the Fifteen has 11 official languages which means there are 110 different language combinations that have to be supported. When the union expands in 2004 a further ten languages will be added raising the number of combinations to 420. The commission translation budget is already €700m per year.

This leaves the administration in Brussels with an unenviable decision: how to cut costs? Whether they choose to drop some languages or pick one (read: English) as a common standard, people are going to be upset. Dave, sci-fi fan that he is, suggests an alternative that wouldn’t offend anyone (or, rather, would probably offend everyone equally)—Klingon—while my scholarly brother Ben proposes Latin as a more traditional alternative. Hey, if it was good enough for Charlemagne…

(Update: As Dave points out in the comments, I should have attributed the above quote to Seán Mac Carthaigh. The original article, from Ireland’s Sunday Business Post, is available here.)

Peter Saint-Andre is a fellow
Denver resident and the guiding light of the city’s only cool software
company, Jabber (and yes, I’m aware
Quark is based here). He is also a
libertarian, and his href="http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/">weblog is the source of a lot of interesting political writing.

Today I was browsing his site and noticed that he has a permanent sidebar link to something called the Free State Project. The Free State-ers are a relatively small group with a fascinating idea: that if enough like-minded, but politically dissident, people were all to move to the same state, they could influence elections in a way they couldn’t hope to elsewhere. As their site explains it:

The Free State Project is a plan in which 20,000 or more liberty-oriented people will move to a single state of the U.S., where they may work within the political system to reduce the size and scope of government. The success of the Free State Project would likely entail reductions in burdensome taxation and regulation, reforms in state and local law, an end to federal mandates, and a restoration of constitutional federalism, demonstrating the benefits of liberty to the rest of the nation and the world.

Of course, this simple plan is not without its difficulties. First, how do you convince 20,000 people from all over the nation to agree on a single state (especially when its a state with a small enough population that they could make a difference, which means something along the lines of Alaska or Wyoming). Second, it seems to me that such a project, which depends heavily on the solidarity of its participants, would be very vunerable to infighting.

As clever as the idea is, I also can’t help but think that such a plan’s success might not bode well for the country. Can you imagine if other political groups were to try similar tactics? Far from the pluralism that has traditionally characterized the US, I can imagine a very Balkanized country.

An interesting idea, though…