20,000 Nations Above the Sea: Is floating the last, best hope for liberty?

http://www.reason.com/news/show/133865.html

by rglovejoy • 17 years ago

20 21 17 years ago

russell• 17 years ago

I saw the movie Waterworld and I dont think I want to live that way. I've become quite fond of trees, mountains, open spaces, and long hikes without a lot of people around.

Anarchy sounds pretty silly to me. Friedman already says they will need police to make sure they aren't harboring terrorists. Sounds like laws and government to me. Building codes? I would think you would need those on a floating community. Maybe a fire department too. Probably like a community maintenance fee. Sounds like a tax to me. What do do with those citizens who cant care for them selves, the sick, the mentally ill, the young, the unskilled? Row them to the mainland ald let some government care for them?

gasull• 17 years ago

Yes, there would be government and taxes, but most probably it wouldn't be an oversized government in the beginning. Rich countries, as they evolve, increase the volume of their government until their bureaucracy fills every niche of the economy and society.

How Rich Countries Die

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/03/16/how-rich-count...

r7000• 17 years ago

Try Greg Egan's Distress for an interesting take on an artificial island without a government in the Pacific called "Stateless". (Plus the Theory-of-Everything, future media, genderless humans and autistic-spectrum rights).

ModelCitizen• 17 years ago

I don't believe that Friedman is pushing anarchy explicitly, at least not with his seasteading project. Instead, I see it as applying a startup model to governments, where people are free to form a government any way they please. It allows people to choose which government they prefer.

Theoretically, I like it. But it's a logistical nightmare.

TrevorJ• 17 years ago

Besides the human-nature problems (Even tiny fiefdoms suffer from the corruption of leadership, etc), you have to basic issue that if history is any indication, eventually your colony will come under the thumb of one nation or another if it grows large enough to warrant attention.

dkokelley• 17 years ago

As much as I believe in economic liberty, societies need social contracts that state what behaviors are considered unacceptable (murder, theft, etc.), a system to modify that contract, a method of enforcing that contract, and a way to pay for that enforcement.

What I just described are laws, lawmakers, law enforcement, and taxes - the fundamentals of a government. Living on a floating island nation isn't about living in anarchy, but about restricting government to its basic elements and allowing as much economic freedom as possible with said government.

zacharypinter• 17 years ago

"The First Annual Seasteading Conference, held in October 2008, draws about 50 people to an Embassy Suites meeting room in Burlingame, California. Most but not all of the attendees are male libertarian Americans in the computer industry."

For some reason this made me smile.

philwelch4• 17 years ago

The thing that amuses me about anarcho-capitalism is that the state seems vitally necessary for capitalism to work. Without a powerful government institutionalizing and enforcing property rights, markets don't work (cf. Hernando de Soto).

In anarchy, you might have one voluntary "enforcement agency" trying to enforce anarcho-capitalist property rights, but an entirely separate voluntary "enforcement agency" trying to enforce a socialist conception of property rights, and various other gangs just mucking shit up.

The only sustainable form of capitalism-in-the-large requires government. At this stage, it probably requires fiat currency, vast amounts of land, urbanization, and serious attention to environmental concerns as well. (By "sustainable" I mean in every sense: in terms of resources, ecology, economics, and technology.)

I used to be a libertarian. I'm still in favor of small governments and market economics, but I'm far more pragmatic about it. And I have no interest in trying to build some aquatic libertopia.

EDIT: Heh, some good parts.

"tight communal living can be stressful, but residents of places such as Antarctica stations already find a way to muddle through"

Tight communal living is a little collectivist for the target market here, eh?

"Why not just do it: build a version of the world you want to live in. Then you get to live in it, regardless of whether anyone else is convinced it’s proper or makes sense."

For most people, the world we want to live in has a lot more to do with weather, landscape, profession, and community than it has to do with politics. California's politics are pretty crap, but it's still a popular place to live because everything else is pretty nice.

laut• 17 years ago

Isn't it ironic that the state as an enforcer of property rights is also a violator of property rights?

Why do you need fiat currencies? Gold has been around as a currency for longer than fiat currencies backed by nothing.

philwelch4• 17 years ago

"Isn't it ironic that the state as an enforcer of property rights is also a violator of property rights?"

Indeed. I don't see any hope for having a non-state enforcer that's anywhere near as effective though, since there would also be a lot of non-state Robin Hoods running around getting into gun battles with any non-state enforcers.

"Why do you need fiat currencies? Gold has been around as a currency for longer than fiat currencies backed by nothing."

Gold was backed by fiat just as much as paper money. The fact that it's useful for noncorrosive electrical conductors and dental work had nothing to do with its suitability as a currency--it's just as arbitrary as cloth-paper renderings of dead presidents. It is, however, rather difficult to control. This has benefits and drawbacks.

Going back to a gold standard would (in the case of a big country) price gold out of the market for any other purpose. In the case of a small country, anyone could screw you over by selling gold reserves (but even big countries would be vulnerable to this). There are also impacts on lending and other business activities that mean that, in a competitive climate, a deflationary currency would have problems competing.

Retric• 17 years ago

There is not even close to enough Gold in the world to back every currency on a global scale. Simple calculation value of the entire world's goods vs. all the worlds Gold vs. value of all the worlds currency in circulation. Trying to use gold on a large economy would create significant economic harm as the rest of the world stayed the way they where.

sfg3• 17 years ago

'you might have one voluntary "enforcement agency" trying to enforce anarcho-capitalist property rights, but an entirely separate voluntary "enforcement agency" enforce a socialist conception of property rights, and various other gangs just mucking shit up'

I think one anarcho-capitalist belief is that the equilibrium reached by these competing interests is one remarkably close to what they want. Or in other words, the radical capitalism they desire spills out from the economic incentives present in a system without government.

Another is that these competing interests would result in a world that is fractured into different legal codes and styles of living and that is a good thing: they have no problem with socialists, only with being forced into living as socialists.

Whether any of this is true or not I do not know. The key would seem to be if these competing interests would wage war or peacefully negotiate.

philwelch4• 17 years ago

It would seem that, over a period of time, these "competing interests" came to dominate their own patches of land. And then the more powerful ones conquered their neighbors. Over time, the nation-state developed.

"Let's start all of political history over again, except with nuclear weapons and machineguns" is not a promising argument to me. That's not the argument an-caps are making, but if you take what you said to its logical conclusion, it's that.

DanielBMarkham• 17 years ago

The thing that amuses me about anarcho-capitalism is that the state seems vitally necessary for capitalism to work.

Whoa horsey. You can drive a Mack truck through that over-generalization.

Some kind of collective enforcement of property rights and contract law might be required, but that's so far from a modern state it's not funny.

It's one thing for a European to shake down some rubes who didn't know enough be cautious and weren't part of his peer group. But we have lots of examples of property and contracts being respected where very, very little government exists. Venice merchants and the silk road, the western United States during the period between 1776 and 1787, Roman traders operating deep inside "primitive" lands, modern mafia bosses and their business deals, Ebay shoppers and reputation-supported transactions. I can go on -- at length.

There's such a little need for government that social mores seem to do just fine in most cases. If there is some role for government at all (and I think there is), it's nowhere near the intrusive monstrosity we have today. Just because the door is open a crack doesn't mean that a herd of elephants can run through. I think that anarcho-capitalism won't work, don't get me wrong. But the degree of community control required for business to flourish is very, very minimal. At least as far as I can see.

It's certainly not a big enough flaw to give up on libertarianism, at least with the little "l"

philwelch4• 17 years ago

"You can drive a Mack truck through that over-generalization."

Can you? Oddly enough, the only capitalisms we've seen in history are states, and the only anarchies we see are...well, places like Somalia.

"Some kind of collective enforcement of property rights and contract law might be required, but that's so far from a modern state it's not funny."

But it is, however, a state.

Development economics shows us that institutions of some sort are necessary. None of the examples you gave were ultimately sustainable. At the least you'd need an authoritative record of who owns what--and with multiple private defense agencies each having their own record, there will be disagreements. Instead of property rights we'd have civil wars.

But fundamentally, we agree--you're not an anarcho-capitalist. And I think we agree that a lot of what the government does is unhelpful. Still, registering property rights and having the power to enforce them is such a fundamental role it's easy to forget.

tophat02• 17 years ago

I like this idea, simply because the world needs a place for radicals to be radical. Sure, there may be a lot of crazy floating cults, but there will probably also be some great advances from societies free of today's regulations and taboos.

huherto• 17 years ago

Interestingly, we worry about conquering space but accordingly to the article we are still a long way to colonizing the oceans. It seems that this is really the next frontier.

tc• 17 years ago

This isn't about anarchy; it's about competition. The thing to keep in mind about governments is that people tolerate their abuses because they provide certain services (protection, property and contract enforcement, etc).

The fundamental idea of Seasteading is that land creates bad governments because the cost of changing providers is prohibitively high. So you end up with a monopoly provider over a certain area that generally becomes wildly inefficient and corrupt (in the sense of institutionally violating the rights of individuals).

No one in the libertarian movement denies the need for someone or some group to provide the services of personal and property right protection, "rule of law," contract enforcement, and whatnot, but if you use the same creativity the people here would apply to any other industry, you clearly see that there must be a better way than what we have now.

That's all anyone is looking for.

sfg3• 17 years ago

Whether this works out or not I love the concept. Attempting to hack the nature of government by changing the incentives it faces.

nradov• 17 years ago

Those clowns will be crying for a Coast Guard rescue as soon as one of their boats springs a leak.

20,000 Nations Above the Sea: Is floating the last, best hope for liberty?

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