About the Editor

Hello everyone it has occurred to me that very few people in the Liberland community may know who I am and so I have decided that in the best interest of everyone that I would write a short bio about myself here.

My name is Martin Bates I am in the United States and have been following Liberland since 2017. I have been a member of the Libertarian Party since 2015 and served as secretary for a local county affiliate in 2016-2017. During my term there I reformed our governing party documents, established a platform and created a legislative affairs committee of which I was chair of. While I was the chair of that committee I read numerous county and city ordinances, 49 state constitutions, the Swiss Constitution and multiple cantonal constitutions all to better improve our community and state as a whole. I have submitted my findings and recommendations to the Florida State Constitutional Revision Commission, the Volusia County Charter Revision Committee, the Town of Pierson, City of Deland, City of Daytona Beach and other governing bodies. I have spoken before each of these governing bodies before mentioned as well as the Volusia County School Board and various city planning and zoning commissions as well. I also have spoken to elected public officials on various topics that include members of the Florida and Missouri legislature.

With these actions one may assume I do this for pay? The answer is NO I have no formal education on these subjects, I hold a degree in Computer Science and have done various types of employment in my life but have spent most of it in logistics and transportation. Having been in 48 US states but no other countries I have some limited experience in how various cultures work as the US does have a wide range of it.

My passion has always been to live in a freer society, I thought I could help bring that back to America or at least to my community but I found out over the years that the rules are dictated from above no matter the level until you get to the US federal bureaucracy and you may as well kiss whatever ideas you had goodbye at that point.

It was while I was feeling these depressed feelings that I found Liberland! The only problem was as I saw it in 2017 was that Croatia would not allow anyone onto the land even if they were EU citizens which I found very odd. I thought the ideas Liberland held were great and I hoped that one day they would become a recognized country. I followed them occasionally and I decided in the beginning of this year I would get more involved.

The only way I saw I could contribute was to writing my thoughts, ideas and opinions on the issues that I have had since my days when I first joined the LP and by doing even more research to add to what I had done back in 2015-2017. This brings me to last week when the President of Liberland asked me if would become the editor of this paper to which I gladly accepted!
i will be republishing quite a few of my article style posts from forum.liberland.org that I have published over there in the coming weeks.

Thank you all for continuing to support Liberland, I will do my best to support this amazing project in the way that I can and hope to be able to meet some of you in the future, thank you Mr. President again for allowing me the opportunity to be the Editor of the Liberland Press!