Libertarian Islands

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I'm thinking something along the lines of a dead hand system might be needed as a hedge against invasion; something chemical or biological would be easy to procure and frightening enough to deter nation states from attacking. Botulism, VX, maybe something radiological like certain isotopes of strontium or cesium, preferably something with a long half life that's expensive to clean up and easily synthesized. Most nations, and more importantly, the politicians who run them, aren't willing to risk that kind of retaliation over something like intellectual property or drug running, there's just no percentage in it. MAD wouldn't be my first choice of defensive mechanisms, but may be the only one powerful enough to keep whole nations at bay. In time I could see seaborne communities switching to small scale fission power, and in that case the risk of nuclear contamination of the surrounding ocean could also serve as a deterrent to force.

Also, things like drug production don't need to be hazardous and dirty, they're like that because they're being done clandestinely with limited precursor chemical availability. A modern lab could produce just about any street drug necessary without undue pollution being released.

Being me, I also favor gun running over drug sales; once the CAD schematics have been created, only raw metal need be fed into the CNC tools for working weapons to be produced, and there is always a market for those. That provides another hedge; most governments occasionally want a deniable source of weapons and materiel for low intensity conflicts and such, and a completely independent supplier would be very useful in this regard.

All that aside, the biggest profit center would probably be online gambling and banking, along with secure remote hosting services. This would work even better with a network of ships and platforms spread out geographically with redundancy built in, maybe use an onion router type scheme like tor. Given the recent crumbling of banking secrecy laws, I see a real demand for truly secure and anonymous banking in the very near future.

Oh great. You Libertarian Paradise would become a Service Economy. Los Vegas without the vowel at the end of the names. What about production? Making stuff? Inventing stuff? Are you going to leave that in the hands of the Statists?

ruveyn

That is work for peasants!

Libertarians just want to sit on their arse being rentiers and feel entitled not to pay any tax for the privilege.

regarding your signature: Richard Feynman was living proof of its untruth. He got his hands dirty.

ruveyn

Of course they don't *need* to be. But if there are no environmental laws limiting waste disposal, why not just dump it all into the ocean? Proper waste disposal is incredibly expensive and becoming more so, even for mundane household waste; medical waste, industrial waste, chemical waste, etc. can be a huge expense for the facilities that produce it. It has even been suggested that the Somali pirates started out as a coast guard type operation b/c so many companies were illegally dumping industrial wast off their shores that it was destroying their fishing industry.

I think that Dox is really just making an argument from comparative advantage. Governmental interventions do not impact all industries equally, and a libertopia created in this kind of manner will likely start off with certain resource advantages and disadvantages as well. I doubt any of that will favor manufacturing. You might have a point about technological development though.

That being said, it isn't as if the idea of a finance-based libertopia is unique to Dox: http://mises.org/daily/2702 While there may be things to disagree with, financial services could be workable for maintaining an economy.

Couldn't these islands be good things?

That's an interesting question. I'd imagine that part of this would go back to the economic interests of libertopia, also probably the evolution of property law in libertopia. It's possible that if the pollution contradicts an economic interest, then we'll see libertopia promote Coase's theorem as a means of solving the problem. However, in practice, who knows how things work out.

Bottom line. Libertopia will not be self sufficient. I will depend on the Statists and the Thugs for its existence.

ruveyn

I think it goes to show you that libertarians really have no clue as to what workers do.

Because true libertarians don't believe in international trade?

Libertopia, if it believes in free trade, will always involve significant economic integration with the Statists and Thugs. If it does not allow free trade, it will not be libertopia, as it will disallow consenting capitalist acts. Even further, if it is an oceanic nation, then trade would be economically rational for such an entity.

But then trade only off-shores the non-consensual exploitation of others work.
This is the problem with Galt Gulch projects they always forget where the calories come from.
Even with that witch Rand's Deus ex machina energy machine the entire valley of idiots
(in the true and original meaning of the word) would have starved in months.
The very fact the enterprise is joint, points out every important human endeavor is communal
no matter how much the shrill Russian Bene Geserite tried to hand wave it away cooperation
not greed is the bias and definition of human society.

Hunh?

I'm merely talking about free trade and comparative advantage. An island nation(or anything similar) will not have much land and thus will not have land-intensive economic production as an area of comparative advantage, therefore it will rely on other nations to take care of a lot of that. Whether foreign nations involve exploitation, are libertarian saints, or even whether foreign nations are really populated by robots, the value of free trade is economical.

Umm.... I don't even know what your point is about greed and cooperation. You seem to be trying to rebut Ayn Rand even though nobody has mentioned her. Libertarianism is a political order. It does not dictate that cooperation not happen. It only seeks to allow market forces and individuals more power as opposed to other forces.

That would probably depend entirely on their success. Sometimes utopian schemes fail. If this island project didn't immediately fail, it probably would develop the institutional and cultural norms to be good things.

Market forces do not have "magic" powers at small scales in fact folks in micro-economies are
in more danger of the ill effects of market regulations of the big states than the people in the large state.
the U.S. gets a sniffle Mexico gets the flu thing.
If you use the micro-nation to violate international vice, banking, taxation and copyright law I say more power to ya.
But to think that a nation that participates in the world economy is somehow free of its restrictions is a bit daft,
as these nations can dictate which of your products they will accept.

I brought of the queen of idiots because this reminded me of her moronic Galts Gulch masturbation
I apologize if that is not what y'all are up to

I see your point when put that way there.


I also see this point as well.


I am just in some online conversation. I think that even if there is some relationship, there is no necessary connection. After all, libertarians, whether they love Ayn Rand or not, tend to like ideas that get government out of the picture.