The residential community and its tourist trade support an organic market, restaurants, bars, a newspaper and a radio station. Marijuana and hashish are by far community's biggest trade, with estimated sales of up to $100,000 a day. Only residents of Christiana may purvey pot. Their booths line Pusher Street like a county fair bake competition. New Harmony was everything George Rapp and Robert Owen wanted America to be – egalitarian. Christiana is everything that America once was – relatively free.

As in early libertarian Indiana, when all nonviolent consensual lifestyles were legally protected, there are only three main simple rules that residents of Christiana live by: No theft…no violence and…be true to your word, otherwise be banished. In other Danish words – if you can't be a good neighbor, or you have a drug habit that encourages you to steal, then get hell out!

Even culture among dozens of pot and hash dealers in Christiana is peaceful. Where Afghan marijuana is sold as freely as bananas, pot merchants don't go chasing each other down Pusher Street with machetes. Contrast this with Indianapolis where half of city's homicides are directly connected to drug prohibition. Christiana is proof that free markets are much, much safer than black markets for everyone involved. Christiana's biggest threats are Liberal-Conservatives, who wish to snuff out its alternative lifestyles and commercially develop its 84 acres of riverfront property. If this happens, freedom lovers from around world, but especially from Denmark, will have one less spot to squat. In any case, New Harmony and Christiana are excellent lessons in politics. Lesson one: Most socialistic utopias fail or disband on their own lack of merit. Lesson two: Libertarian utopias, such as Christiana and early America, only fail when taken over or snuffed out by people who practice intolerance or who otherwise turn their backs on utopia's ideals.

I began voting Libertarian when I realized that both Indiana General Assembly and Congress had strayed from their sole purpose to secure our natural rights and were violating them on behalf of special interest groups, including people in government.

For example, income tax violates at least three of our natural rights: our rights to work, to contract and to exclusive possession of our property. If we still exercised these rights, we could choose to work without first presenting a Social Security number. We would not be required to sign forms and report to government every year, and we would take home all of our pay.

Most economic monopolies would not exist if our governments respected our natural rights to contract. We could hire whom we wanted to represent us in court, teach our children, or relieve our pain – based on their background, education and experience – not on government’s meaningless, biased and often dangerous stamps of approval.

In a world that respected our choices, there would be no licensed health-care monopoly, which uses government to protect and insulate itself from 100,000 people it negligently kills each year. There would also be no education monopoly, run by teachers unions, to march our children into mediocrity. Injustice and ignorance are just two of consequences when special interest groups use government to trample upon others’ rightful choices.

So hear it from a government major: Our state and federal governments’ sole legitimate function is to aid us in self-defending our own natural unalienable rights, and every single one of them is doing a horrible job at it. Almost every piece of modern legislation violates someone’s natural rights, which all governments long ago promised to protect.

This is all because our current political leaders know less about purpose of government than you do right now.