The movement toward pursuing personal freedom, more often than not, comes from a place of prior conformity to the social norms. One of the major limitations along the journey from sheep to shepherd is lack of funds and support.
A Liberty Tool Library (LTL) would be one outstanding way for people to gain access to the tools and gear necessary to pursue a life of freedom while growing their social network at the same time.
To fully explain how a LTL might work, let’s first start with a hypothetical story.
Janey Wakes Up
Hello everyone, meet Janey. She’s a wonderful person who has done well at everything she’s been told she needs to do to live a happy life.
But.
Janey’s not happy.
She commutes 45 minutes to a dead end job with a bunch of great people who watch the clock all day. She loves her kids and family dearly, but she feels like she never sees them. When she picks her kids up from school she has to get them home, fed, cleaned up and in bed, all the while hoping that her husband won’t be home late from work again.
The American Dream that isn’t so dreamy.
Then, one day, something she read, or something she heard flipped a little switch in her perspective. She reflects; why the hell is she busting her ass, always feeling terrible with never enough time. So. She decides to start a garden.
She starts a garden because it will get her hands in the dirt. It will give her something to be proud of, that first sun warmed tomato will be the best tomato ever grown on the face of the planet. She’s going to start this garden with her kids. They’re going to grow together by growing food together. It will be healthy and stress relieving and when they do harvest that first summer squash, they’re going to eat it at the dinner table as a family, for the first time in a long time.
Related: Five Tips for an Epic Spring Garden
But Janey Has a Problem, well, many problems
First off, the time she and hubby put into growing their careers has been matched with lifestyle inflation, so even though they bust their ass, they’re barely scraping by.
Furthermore, no one has ever taught Janey how to grow food. She knows almost nothing about it, but she’s not going to let that stop her. Somehow, she learned that she can put in a raised bed garden right on the edge of their postage stamp yard, so that’s what she’s going to do.
But!
She’s never built a raised bed garden. Actually, she’s never built anything. And sadly, neither has hubby. He’s a finance guy. Couldn’t tell a circular saw from a drill press.
Again, through persistence, she finds an article that shows her how to build a raised bed garden. She’s going to need some pressure treated 2×10’s, 4×4’s, sawhorses, a circular saw, a speed square, a hammer, some nails, an extension cord, a post hole digger, a shovel, a rake, some soil, and some compost.
How on earth is Janey going to afford to buy all that and get it to her house in her little car, and figure out how to put it all together?
This problem, and so many like it, can be solved by a Liberty Tool Library.
The Fundamentals of a Liberty Tool Library
To the best of my knowledge, no Liberty Tool Library exists at this time. If I’m so fortunate to build one it would be a collection of like-minded people who come together to help one another by welcoming others to use their tools, gear, and equipment to pursue a better life.
Imagine a categorized, organized and searchable list of tools and gear online that you can request to borrow from someone near you. Someone who has been vetted by the group to be of good moral character and who will probably love to answer some questions about the project you’re working on, and your own path to freedom.
You reach out to the person through the site and make your request. They consider the request and decide to let you borrow what you need for some predetermined length of time on the condition that you assure them that you’ll return the tools in as good, or better, condition than you found them.
You arrive to pick up the tools, conversation ensues, you learn how to use the tools as well as the tips and tricks to do your job efficiently. You might even find someone willing to help you.
As a good steward of your new friend’s equipment, you use them with respect, you clean them up when you’re done, and do your best to take them back to your friend in better condition than you found them.
Upon completion of the loan, each of you log back into your online account on the LTL and rate the experience, the tools and the person as you see fit.
What are “Tools”?
The story makes a lot of sense when it’s applied to saws, sawhorses, extension cords, and hammers. But let us be careful to not limit the potential of this idea.
What if we could also grow our community to share:
- Outdoor equipment: Tents, packs, tarps, coolers. A critical part of finding personal freedom is dedication to family relationships, and there are few finer places to converse with a kid than over a campfire. Plus, it’s way cheaper than Disney.
- Food Preservation Equipment: Canning, fermenting, dehydrating. These items collect dust more often than they are used. PLUS there can be a steep learning curve (both information and courage) to properly take on these life skills.
- Child Rearing Essentials: Clothes, cribs, toys. There are probably enough kid’s clothes on the planet. Imagine the joy in raising kids without having to buy ANY clothes for them. Not to mention the cool threads collected by fellow freedom seekers.
- Party Supplies: Tables, tents, chairs, kegerators. My town library currently offers some tents, tables and chairs and my family has used them several times. It’s awesome! It’s also inspiration that the idea can work, and it should be taken to the next level.
When the community grows, so too will the interests and subsequently this list. It is limited only by our combined creativity.
Freedom Isn’t Free
The cruel reality is that a database like this will take time, energy and money to build and maintain. I value my own time, and I expect that you value yours, too. For that reason, and perhaps because people have a history of abusing free services, it is likely that a fee structure would be necessary.
However!
The whole idea is that this is a resource for people stretched thin trying to make a positive change in their life.
A full financial model cannot be run until a greater understanding of the interface is determined, but my ambition would be that there can be several tiers available, starting with at least a monthly and yearly membership. I’ve also considered the idea that a modest discount can be applied to people who contribute tools and supplies to the library.
Creative funding should not be overlooked, and it’s not outside the realm of possibility that some groups or businesses would take interest in helping support such an endeavor, be it out of good will, or for marketing purposes.
Life Is Risky
The primary reason this can’t work with the general public is because people don’t trust one another, and they’re not willing to take the risk of their tools being lost/broken/stolen by others.
A goal with this project is that it be self-regulating. There will be risk. It will hopefully be mitigated by attracting the right type of people through targeted awareness and deliberate sharing of the ethics and values of the community. With that in mind, I feel that this could be an awesome movement to ride on the coattails of the Free State Project.
Furthermore, people who choose to violate the ethics of the program will hopefully receive honest, poor reviews to raise awareness to other potential lenders.
Steps to Make it Happen
The first step is to find a community willing to embrace the idea. I tried this in a small NH town, and even there, it met a lot of resistance due to our fear of one another.
If a community embraces the idea, the next step would be to design the interface. The first stab I took at it was with WordPress and the Business Directory Plugin, but to be perfect, this might require dedicated coding.
Once an interface is flushed out, funding would need to be raised to build out the interface.
Given what humans can code these days, it seems well within reason that an appropriate suite of plugins could be implemented or built to host the library, and from there the library can grow as quickly as members can participate.
With the Right People, It’s a Doable Project
If this hasn’t blown your mind, I hope it has at least given you pause at the potential that a community coming together can offer. The whole being greater than the sum of the parts.
A Liberty Tool Library can unite like-minded people and offer them resources and money (in the terms of savings) to accomplish in short time what would otherwise take a lifetime or longer.
Please post questions and comments below. What did I miss? Why won’t it work? Why aren’t we already doing it? Or, is there already an example of this happening and I just haven’t found it?
-NHMan
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