Libertarian Islands

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I Apologize for my anti-Objectivist invective I think her dull thinking has infected and damage
many a young libertarian (Greenspan) and she should not be encouraged.

so about Size. A colony under 300 or so you will need hardly any government at all good-will, familial ties
common purpose and ideological homogeneity (they are all libertarians right?) should do you.
actually the lack of a centralized power to vie for reduces struggle for dominance. (Who wants to be a constitutionally
strait-jacketed king?) For me this not economic deregulation is the real draw of libertarian systems.

I'm only being half serious with most of this, it's one of those things I just do when an idea is suggested and I immediately start mentally fine tuning. I have thought off and on about seastedding for some time, so some of what I'm putting out here is ideas I'd had some time ago while others are more spontaneous riffs off of things other people have posted.

"Offshore Vegas" was actually my internal name for an early revenue generating scheme of providing an offshore sin city that could travel near the more socially restrictive countries of the globe and provide gambling, drinking, sex, etc in a controlled and secure environment.

Arbitrage seems another likely profit maker, especially in the arms trade. You always hear stories of $5 AKs and the like in parts of Africa and Asia, I'd snap those up, fix them and turn them for hundreds a piece in a different market, easy money. I'd of course supplement this with models of my own design and manufacture, as it is I'm stuck on a few concepts that I have the skill to build but can't obtain the permitting to assemble prototypes, which would not be a problem in a seastedding situation. I imagine the trade in sterile guns alone could be quite lucrative, as well as providing security by making the project useful to traditional nation states.

Hmm, my inner evil genius is suggesting that tax exiles would make excellent citizens of the new seafaring nation and that providing such a shelter/haven for them could be profitable as well.

What about people who actually -make things- or -invent things-? What about people who grow or gather our food from nature? What about a self sufficient libertopia not dependent on the Statists and the Thugs? This the nation that the United States should have been and never became.

ruveyn

I'd think you of all people Ruveyn would get what I'm saying, producing actual innovations and technological advances is great, but short term such a project would need a way to get off the ground and become sustainable before longer term aims could be initiated. It would be great if someone could put together a self sustaining community free of interference to pursue research and experimentation tomorrow and just add people, but it's not that simple. In the meantime, I'm thinking of practical services such a society could provide both as a means of funding and as a way of securing non-interference from both nation states and rogue free agents of the criminal variety.

Like I said, I'm in the exact boat of having my field of expertise heavily regulated with often byzantine bureaucracies to navigate, I could have built working prototypes of some of my designs years ago if doing so wasn't a federal felony. Give me a boat and some machine tools and I'd advance the world of small arms design within a year or two, less if I had access to CNC tools and a skilled CAD/CAM operator.

I don't think an island libertopia would ever be self-sufficient. Instead, libertopian seasteads are very likely to be highly urban areas. If land is costly, then we're not going to do anything land-intensive.

Even further, if libertopia is a free-trade area, then it will naturally have some tendency to specialize in the international market. There would be no push FOR it to become self-sufficient, unless political forces tried to band against it too heavily. I mean, a free trade nation is not likely going to aim for self-sufficiency, and that's just how reality works, and libertarianism is generally in favor of free trade, particularly the strands that come from economics.

so it would be different that Singapore how?

Different legal and political structure. Different culture. Singapore is known for being somewhat socially conservative and having brutal punishments and punishments for minor offenses. Libertopia is probably going to draw from the more liberal side of US culture, and will generally likely not tend towards caning and things like that.

In many ways, yes, it would have to be similar to Singapore. The economic factors that libertopian islands would have access to would approximately be the same as the ones that Singapore has access to. They're both land-poor. They're both oceanic. Etc. Economic factors will play a major role in where economic growth goes. That's just that and pretending otherwise is pointless.

I would rather come up with a unified theory of physics than a new gun.

If you are going to invent a new gun, at least base it on electrical capacitance. That way you have a phasor you can set to stun and potentially a new and useful way of storing large amounts of energy.

Guns that go bang(!) are so retro. We have had them for 500 years.

ruveyn

If this is a comment on libertopia, this kind of innovation is not likely to come first from libertopia, unless this is just an application of pre-existing research. Engineering is institutionally easier than blue sky research, and some doubt that a libertopia could ever come up with the institutional structure needed for blue-sky research. (They may be wrong, but it isn't easy to figure out how this will emerge, and it definitely won't emerge in the first few years anyway)

I think this is really planned more as being the size of cities, but the real draw being the allowance for real competition of government ideas. So, the idea is that by making city-ships, we can start having more competitors to already established governments.

"The vision of seasteading is an urgent one. We can already see that existing political systems are straining to cope with the realities of the 21st century. We need to create the next generation of governance: banking systems to better handle the inevitable financial crises, medical regulations that protect people without retarding innovation, and democracies that ensure our representatives truly represent us.

Seasteaders believe that government shouldn't be like the cell phone carrier industry, with few choices and high customer-lock-in. Instead, we envision a vibrant startup sector for government, with many small groups experimenting with innovative ideas as they compete to serve their citizens' needs better."
http://seasteading.org/mission/intro

(Note: It must be pointed out that competitive government may never end up at a true libertopia. That is that efficient governments include MORE public goods than libertarians like allowing. Part of the conversation is put astray by the conflation of two different issues though, and that's probably difficult to avoid here as libertarians expect competitive government to end up at libertopia)

Now you know why the Greeks regarded -the polis-, the city state as the ideal form of government. It was big enough to have economic diversity and small enough to manage.

Too large to be an insane asylum and way to small to be an empire.

ruveyn

They've tried this before. They called it "The Republic of Minerva" which was supposed to be a libertarian nation built up on an atoll near Tonga. However Tonga quickly laid claim to the atoll and the king sent a military to overtake it. The libertarians offered no resistance and the project disintegrated into history.

On a personal note, I would like nothing more than for libertarians to build their own artificial island country in the middle of the ocean. I hope it's a big island that can accommodate hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, rich and poor, able and disabled, so they can eventually learn why libertarianism, like communism, fails when applied to large scale situations.

Like the public good of the deck you are walking on in a floating city?
I like the idea of diversity of government let the libertarians have their cities the communists and even the fascists their own.
But within a system that allows free-emigration (<-note the "e") so that the idea of competition really works.

Like the public good of the deck you are walking on in a floating city?
I like the idea of diversity of government let the libertarians have their cities the communists and even the fascists their own.
But within a system that allows free-emigration (<-note the "e") so that the idea of competition really works.

The Seasteading Institute is a 501(c)(3) Tax-Exempt charity http://seasteading.org/contribute/membe ... -donations

Since their goal is to form their own governments, I wonder how that gets around the law against charities being involved in politics?

Presumably a libertarian island society would try to get around the theoretical problem of public property/goods since such things are anathema to their ideology. I can imagine a complex series of legal maneuvers (remember that this microstate would come to exist within the context of international law). The platform, as it's being built, or acquired through purchase from an oil company or such would require the laying down of capital from persons under one or more legal jurisdictions. This laying down of capital would tie the platform to these jurisdictions through tax codes and other government regulations. To sever the tie with existing, statist states, a sleight of hand must be performed.

A new state must come into being. For pedagogic purposes, let's call it the Microstate of Liberty Island. The sole duties of this microstate shall be to:

• Declare the sovereignty of the platform and its jurisdiction thereof and the waters nearby, to the extent accepted by international law
• Charter a corporation whose reason for being is to hold the platform as its property
• Proscriptions against initiation of force and fraud with enforcement delegated to the corporation

Existing stakeholders transfer ownership rights to the new corporation, which puts the platform in definite private hands—in a corporation not tied to any existing jurisdiction. The corporation can then assign various property/ownership rights to individuals through private contract. Presumably the contracts would give property holders wide berth along the lines of libertarianism, letting disputes be settled through arbitration. For parts of the platform/deck that have not been sold to others, presumably the platform corporation would allow the comings and goings of most individuals and ships in accordance with libertarian ideology. The corporation would be governed by its shareholders; presumably property holders would get shares of the corporation as part of buying property on the island. Registration of subsequent corporations would be there decided (or perhaps dealt with through contract and convention rather than any one central authority registering the existence of these corporations).

Though fraud can be dealt with as a matter of private/contract law settled through arbitration, crimes stemming from initiation of force (assault, murder, rape, theft, vandalism, etc.) could not really be handled within the framework of private contract between individuals. At best, it can be viewed as violation of a contract between the offender and the corporation or other property holder that gave them rights to belong on the island (the mere being on the island could be considered an implied contract). Still, enforcement becomes tricky. You would have aspects of policing/apprehension, punishment, etc. that could not easily be put into a libertarian, non-"statist" framework. For example, a murderer may be hiding in someone's house on the island. Can police just enter without the owner's permission? Would this violate the sanctity of private property? Hopefully the contract with the island corporation would include a clause for circumstances like this, but otherwise the right to enforce the prohibitions against force and fraud could supersede the contract (giving the interaction a very statist feel).

Still, just about the whole thing could be considered private property and private contracts with owners voluntarily creating libertarian conditions for others to participate in. The island corporation would have something of a state-like feel to it although it would technically be considered a private corporation. The fact that a state power is delegated to it (enforcement) gives it the feel of acting on behalf of the state in enforcement circumstances. Its board of directors could feel like a clubby oligarchy.