Techno-libertarians are flocking to the Caribbean

https://economist.com/the-americas/2026/06/11/techno-libertarians-are-flocking-to-the-caribbean

by andsoitis • 1 month ago

65 46 1 month ago

economist.com

Avicebron2• 1 month ago

https://archive.is/gWfRv

m348e912• 1 month ago

https://archive.is/gWfRv

This article is about a project called "Destiny" (https://destiny.com), an economic zone to be created in an undeveloped region of Nevis (of St. Kitts & Nevis)

The project goal is to become like Dubai with a 50m dollar investment, which I don't think is an admirable goal btw.

St Kitts & Nevis has had a history of being friendly to crypto and there was an initiative to make bitcoin cash legal tender, although don't think it ever actually happened.

https://www.investing.com/news/cryptocurrency-news/bitcoin-c...

sampton• 1 month ago

Without a proper supply chain 50m is just a fart in the wind.

cosmicgadget• 1 month ago

It's like a Fyre festival but you live there!

WaitWaitWha2• 1 month ago

I been to St. Kitts & Nevis. The only thing I can remember is the very stark contrast between the commercialized beaches versus where the locals lived, and the roaming cows everywhere.

Nevis (the baseball) was only boat accessible, and St. Kitts (the bat) is mostly hills of national park.

Vast majority of things must be flown or shipped in. I am hard pressed to see some "techno libertarians" doing techno without Amazon/Temu/Walmart/<insert fav vendor> in 24h drop ship.

monerochan3• 1 month ago

Vast majority of things must be flown or shipped in. I am hard pressed to see some "techno libertarians" doing techno without Amazon/Temu/Walmart/<insert fav vendor> in 24h drop ship.

I think this is an unreasonable bar. All the fertile land in the world has been accounted for. There's no way to accomplish that type of sustainability without conquering existing land or some major technological breakthrough.

I think a fair bar would be economic sustainability. Plenty of countries depend on trade for food, but can make up for it in exports.

a_paddy• 1 month ago

Bitcoin Cash, legal.

Bitcoin, cash legal.

mothballed4• 1 month ago

A glance at their website shows 25% of the profit being paid out between the government, residents, scholarship funds, etc.

So you're effectively paying US taxes from the get go, before you even get to the point of anything at all going towards basic services.

danaris• 1 month ago

The project goal is to become like Dubai with a 50m dollar investment

Thanks, I needed a good laugh.

To "become like Dubai" they'd need at least another 3 orders of magnitude on that investment.

For reference, the university I worked at until last year recently renovated the building I was working in. It was a fairly standard-sized academic building for a small liberal arts campus—three stories, with roughly 3-8 classrooms on a side. The renovation was the replacement of its HVAC system, and adding a fairly small "bump-out" addition on one of the short sides, of roughly one medium-large classroom's width.

It cost $35 million.

$50 million would build maybe a couple of decent-sized buildings, or a handful of smaller ones. No skyscrapers. Nothing fancy.

Certainly nothing like Dubai.

(According to Wikipedia, when it was built, the Burj Khalifa alone cost $1.5 billion. With a "b".)

zabzonk• 1 month ago

Makes for a target-rich environment, I guess.

mohamedkoubaa• 1 month ago

A fool and his wealth is soon parted

schlap• 1 month ago

They'll figure out soon enough why people vacation instead of live there

lacy_tinpot• 1 month ago

At some point people will also figure out why these people are fleeing.

krisboyz781• 1 month ago

There's nothing wrong with living in the Caribbean. Tons of people live there for a reason. Biggest issue with the Caribbean is the price of property, susceptibility to climate disasters and susceptibility to external political forces which means constant securit threat.

CGMthrowaway2• 1 month ago

These are billionaires, pretty sure they will only do 183 days and being on your boat probably counts.

hatthew• 1 month ago

As someone with no plans to live or vacation in the caribbean, I'm curious. Is there a specific notable reason, or is it just a combination of littler things (cost, convenience, politics, weather, etc.)?

rjbwork• 1 month ago

I've spend a total of about 2 months in the Carribean. One of those being an entire month straight.

It's the convenience really, and the fact that nobody is in a hurry. Island time is real. You cannot be demanding. You can't really be upset at service. Most people are there to chill out, even if they are doing a job. Life is just slower.

This is good, IMO. But if you are a hedonically adapted/burned out western metropolis dweller, this culture shock could be distressing.

almostdeadguy• 1 month ago

Guess a lot of these guys heard about Little Saint James from the news.

lurk2• 1 month ago

In 2014 it was Chile, in 2017 it was Honduras, then Colombia and El Salvador in the early 2020s. In Chile and Colombia they were coasting on tax authorities not pursuing them and relying on the cultural cachet of being thought-leading risk takers who were forward-thinking enough to take on a new frontier (remember this is when they started flying south for ayahuasca ceremonies). In the case of Honduras and El Salvador, they were setting up in tax-free zones (which is effectively a transfer of wealth from those outside of the zone to those inside). Notable that the periods of Chilean and Salvadorian history that these “libertarians” tend to celebrate were periods of political repression. I can’t imagine these ventures will be any different.

supertroop• 1 month ago

Remember the scene in Blow when Johnny Depp’s character goes to Columbia to make a withdrawal from the millions he’s been sending to their banks and they are like like “huh, we don’t remember you creating an account here. Good day sir. Please leave.”

skeledrew• 1 month ago

Way things are looking, Cuba will soon be on the table for a dime. Right after Trump razes it to get rid of the "undesirables".

CGMthrowaway2• 1 month ago

These projects obviously have limited success. I found it interesting to learn about a couple that were very successful, though.

1) the Republic of Venice from 7th to 18th centuries, basically a merchant-run state controlled by a tight circle of wealthy traders. Its whole setup revolved around safeguarding trade and property and staying clear of the Catholic church and European kings.

2) the Republic of Ragusa from 14th to 19th centuries, in what’s now Dubrovnik, run by a small group of merchant families. Strong focus on open commerce and neutrality, made early advances in public health and infrastructure and had its own privately funded healthcare and insurance, all paid for by trade profits

wolvesechoes• 1 month ago

If you consider them libertarian projects they failed. That's the thing about libertarianism - to succeed it needs to reinvent stuff that it is so opposed to.

Venice and Ragusa (and Genoa) were oligarchic states, had laws, and used force to enforce these laws. Civic liberties were suspended or heavily restricted.

Animats• 1 month ago

What, again? Neither of the "Bitcoin island" schemes ever happened. The seasteading people failed to convince anybody that living on an old anchored cruise ship just for a tax break was worth it. The Sea Pod didn't look survivable in a storm.

Red Rock Island in San Francisco Bay [1] is apparently for sale again. It was supposedly sold in 2025, but that deal may have fallen through. Nobody built anything on it. Five acres of rock with cliffs. It's basically a mountain peak sticking out of water. It would take a lot of money and work to do something with it. At least as much as the Eagle's Nest [2], plus the costs of operating on an island. Which means there are about a dozen people in the Bay Area who could afford it.

[1] https://www.latitude38.com/lectronic/red-rock-island-isan-fr...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kehlsteinhaus

mothballed4• 1 month ago

Libertarians did make an actual island, Republic of Minerva, but the Australian/western and Polynesian governments were so scared shitless of a tiny island of libertarians that they concocted a story about it being "Tongan fishing lands" (despite the fact being way out of Tongan waters and Tonga basically ~never having mentioned it until some other people decided to put an island there). Then they sent the Tongan Navy to take it by force.

http://www.queenoftheisles.com/HTML/Republic%20of%20Minerva....

MichaelZuo2• 1 month ago

What exactly is the argument for why their credibility should be taken as higher than the Tonga government claims?

Because there clearly could be ulterior motives involved on both sides.

vovavili• 1 month ago

Nothing scares a cartel of coercive monopolies extracting rent from trivial administrative work more than competition.

p1necone• 1 month ago

I'm eternally disappointed that none of these libertarian projects even manage to survive long enough to hit the "oops we just reinvented government and taxes" stage.

Avicebron2• 1 month ago

They don't want to actually create anything for anyone else or the messaging would be different.

It's the same energy of a kid running away from home to the tree house in the yard. All they want is to have all the benefits of society (imagine if they were barred from reentering their home country or traveling anywhere else because Pirate-Monaco-Dubai-island(tm) doesn't have real passports) and not be held responsible for their destructive behavior and impulses.

monerochan3• 1 month ago

True, but this is what distinguishes libertarianism from anarchism. Libertarians aren't pursing anarchy, they're pursuing a minimal government and a global environment that makes governments compete on taxes/protections/benefits/etc.

The most extreme form of libertarianism, minarchism, still proposes the existence of a government

arcfour• 1 month ago

Libertarianism is a spectrum. The majority believe in some form of government, just limited in what it can do to varying degrees. The are also anarchists, yes, but that's not all libertarians.

m0llusk• 1 month ago

Casting seasteading as a tax avoidance strategy because some loud self proclaimed Libertarians were briefly involved is really sad. Some people really are entranced with the idea of living on the seas and building communities there. Given what goes on with cruise ships and aircraft carriers this isn't even a particularly challenging goal. Put down your aggressively critical politics for a moment and let yourself enjoy that others can dream.

Shalomboy• 1 month ago

Great username. I too wished to live at sea once, but I gotta be honest with you; hang around any of the big submariner/shipwright/offshore groups for long enough and it will shock you how few people with money in those circles are not Andrew Ryan wannabes. As an avid Cousteau and Earle fan all my life, it broke my heart. If you're uber-wealthy, seeking recognition for that success makes enough sense; that recognition typically comes from people who inevitably live on shore someplace. They might commission a big yacht like Gaben or Zuck, but it serves multiple purposes, not the least of which being "hey, look at me!" But there is a particular type of personality for whom keeping to themselves is the height of luxury, and a couple folks of this persuasion are incredibly wealth. These dragons hoard their keep because, philosophically, it is theirs to do with as they please and not anybody else's. For them, the inherent eroticism of the sea calls their name. I swear to God, it happens every time.

nephihaha• 1 month ago

This reminds me of New Utopia and Lazarus Long. I think he wanted to build it on an unclaimed seamount in the western Caribbean.

thatmf• 1 month ago

The Veritas Villages claim to have an education and health-care charity called Help Them Help Themselves.

These people could not be more comically despicable if they tried.

Also one of their "executives" is seemingly a teenager [0]

[0] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6866a3346a2532...

taivare• 1 month ago

I just wrote about this https://open.substack.com/pub/greggbarbers/p/the-productive-...

altairprime• 1 month ago

So long and prosper.

vrganj• 1 month ago

Here's a fun video that goes through the details of a related project, libertarian sea pods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5V_FM0mLC0c

Theres a long history of these things being poorly thought out ideological projects by people with too much money and not enough understanding of the real world.

Curious to see the hilarous ways this new wave will fail in.

saguntum• 1 month ago

The recent citations are definitely interesting, but none of this is really new. I met with some VCs in the early 10s, and some of them talked about "free enterprise zones" in various areas in the region. Frankly, I'm a little surprised this isn't discussed more. Maybe because the need for "liberty" is less in the realm of bits & bytes for these developments, it is less publicized.

wbshaw• 1 month ago

Interesting that Larry Ellison owns 95% of one entire Hawaiian island (Lanai) and no one seems to notice.

Techno-libertarians are flocking to the Caribbean

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