Libertarian City-States?
May 27th, 2008 | by Paul Merda |A few Libertarians are trying to put their money where their mouth is. Tired of their country and the government that drags them down they are planning to build a “Spar Platform” in International waters to house their vision of a Libertarian City-State. Peter Thiel has just ponied up the first 1/2 Million dollars for this vision.
How long will it be before every major company in America moves their headquarters and their assets to the ultimate off-shore account, their own City-State?
24 Responses to “Libertarian City-States?”
By Craig R. Harmon on May 27, 2008 | Reply
Yep…Atlas is about to shrug, baby. We, the living are gonna be ready. Will you?
By Craig R. Harmon on May 27, 2008 | Reply
Who is John Galt?
By Jersey McJones on May 27, 2008 | Reply
Why build a platform city when we already have a libertarian utopia - Somalia! LOL!!!
Good ol’ Objectivist libertarians - what would life be like without the political philosophy of spoiled teenagers and cheap labor cons?
JMJ
By Paul Watson on May 27, 2008 | Reply
Meh. We’ve had Sealand for years, guys, and the world hasn’t ended yet. Keep up.
By Paul Merda on May 27, 2008 | Reply
I just think the implications for this are astounding. Imagine every corporation or really wealthy guy buying himself an offshore city-state that they can make up their own rules on. No taxes, no laws against anything, no responsibilty to anyone but themselves…
By Craig R. Harmon on May 27, 2008 | Reply
On a related note, a smaller government, lower taxes candidate who unabashedly declares America to be a fair and decent country could win in November…by a landslide, if Rasmussen’s poll is accurate.
…
So where were all these Americans when that balding guy from Law & Order was running for the Republican nomination being all small-governmenty, lower-taxy, America is greaty?
By Jersey McJones on May 27, 2008 | Reply
Sounds to me like most Americans are morons, Craig.
JMJ
By Ken Grandlund on May 27, 2008 | Reply
I wonder how many of those surveyed understand that governmental services aren’t limited to food stamps and health care…do they actually consider services that have prolonged our lives like food and drug regulation? (Even with the Bush Admin gutting these kinds of agencies, they still manage to do some good work.) Or services like defense and proper care of soldiers? Or roads? Do these same folks want to privatize common infrastructure too?
Frankly- the government collects enough taxes (IMO) but have a horrible grasp on spending priorities and fiscal restraint, not to mention on how the pie gets divvied up…
By rube cretin on May 27, 2008 | Reply
Bellemy Brother’s “Old Hippie”,
He turned thirty-five last Sunday
In his hair he found some gray
But he still ain’t changed his lifestyle
He likes it better the old way
So he grows a little garden in the back yard by the fence
He’s consuming what he’s growing nowadays in self defense
He get’s out there in in the twilight zone
sometimes when it just don’t make no sense
He’s an old hippie
and he don’t know what to do
should he hang on to the old
should he grab on to the new
he’s an old hippie
his new life is just a bust
he ain’t trying to change nobody
he just trying real hard to adjust
By Craig R. Harmon on May 27, 2008 | Reply
And it sounds to me like a minority of Americans think higher taxes and bigger government are the bees knees and that we live in a piece of crap for a country, Jersey. How’s it feel to be in the minority?
By Craig R. Harmon on May 27, 2008 | Reply
Ken,
Impossible to say since none of those questions were asked. Naturally, it’s not wise to try to draw too many specific conclusions from such a survey — like whether the majority of Americans think we need a weaker national defense or that regulations that restrict what property owners can and cannot do with their own property if there should be found an exotic and endangered fungus or toad on their property are not quite what the founders had in mind when they wrote the Constitution — but I think it does catch a trend of thought that makes people like Rev. “Obama’s pastor for 20 years” Wright, “I’m not sorry we set bombs” “I think we didn’t do enough” Ayers and Dohrn, Michelle “For the first time in my adult life I’m proud of my country” Obama genuine albatrosses…in the literary and strictly metaphorical sense, of course…to a presidential campaign.
By Craig R. Harmon on May 27, 2008 | Reply
It does, however, indicate that conservatism is far from dead in this country. The bad news is, neither Bush nor McCain are particularly libertarian in their conservatism.
By Craig R. Harmon on May 28, 2008 | Reply
Yes. Part of Ayn Rand’s philosophy so-called is laissez faire attitude of government toward businesses and egoism or what might be called selfishism.
In Atlas Shrugged, if you haven’t read the book, both government and the national attitude toward government have turned to collectivism to the point that businesses are so burdened by arbitrary regulation and governmental coercion that they can have proprietary intellectual property taken from them by the government which then gives said property to their competitors — a kind of open-source model but by force rather than by voluntary cooperation — for example, to the point that business owners no longer control their own businesses and profitable operation becomes impossible.
At that point, the producers begin disappearing, leaving behind their businesses completely destroyed. One oil producer leaves his wells in flames that are not able to be put out by any known means for many months. They just burn.
These producers have made their way to a hidaway, hidden from those not in the know by a sort of optical illusion, making it appear that the entrance is actually a lake. Inside their hideaway, they propose to create a laissez faire utopia where competition is cut-throat. Where competitors openly threaten to undercut and drive one another out of business through their superior creativity in an environment that rewards both entrepreneurial creativity and cut-throat competition.
The outside world is left to disintegrate, as, in Rand’s mind, they must because “from those who are able to those who are in need” is a theory of economics that cannot but fail because it disincentivises the able from producing because they soon learn that they produce only to have his produce taken by force by the state and redistributed to those who refuse to work, those who become the ever increasing “those who are in need”.
It is burdened by an interminable section where through the protagonist John Galt, Ms. Rand explains her philosophy. It really does seem interminable — I’ve only made it all the way through the speech once, as many times as I’ve read the book. The characterizations are laughable and the plot, utterly implausible. What is compelling to me, though, in spite of all its flaws, is Rand’s take-down of collectivism. Being an emigrant from the USSR, she had first hand knowledge of the operation, the coercion, the arbitrary injustice, the spirit crushing evil which results from a system that purports to bring about the best of all worlds: a society where all share equally in the material wealth and spiritual goodness of all of its members.
Now this real-life deal is not quite so earthshaking as was Ms. Rand’s distopian/utopian vision but it does have that flavor to it.
By Badtux on May 28, 2008 | Reply
Meh. Libertopians are always floating these schemes. The problem is that they can never manage to make the passports issued by these micro-states be recognized by any other nation, so when they tire of floating around in a giant bathtub and want to step onto solid land,they have to use their old nationality’s passport to do so.
These micro-states printing their own passports is like me printing Penguin Dollars in my back room. Sure, I can do it. But I better have something that people want if I want them to accept Penguin Dollars. And thus far, none of these micro-states have ever had anything that would make land-based states accept their passports as valid. So eventually people get disillusioned, and go back home, and the “micro-state” gets towed back into port for another group of Libertopians to lease and find out the hard way that the real world doesn’t work like an Ayn Rand novel…
By Craig R. Harmon on May 28, 2008 | Reply
Badtux,
But the one thing we know about this guy is that he’s a successful businessman. Translation, he has things that the world wants and is willing to make him rich to get them. Create a PayPal or a Google and you too could be a Libertopian. Here’s the thing. These guys don’t even need factories to provide what makes them rich. They’ve got the internets. They don’t need to leave home.
By Craig R. Harmon on May 28, 2008 | Reply
And in today’s world, they don’t even have to print their own currency. They can trade in any currency in the world from their computers. Probably Euros will be the preferred currency, since the Dollar’s fallen on hard times of late. I don’t think your objections raise any legitimate questions about the viability of the idea.
By Paul Merda on May 28, 2008 | Reply
I am complety interested in how this will pan out…
In the article they mention “flying flags of convenience” where they would pay a Nation-State to fly their colors. This will allow for passports as well as keep every other Nation on earth from claiming them as their own. Apparently without a Flag in International waters, any Nation could claim them as their own and force them into “servitude”…
By Jet Netwal on May 28, 2008 | Reply
Arrrrgh! Can an influx of piracy be far behind?
By Craig R. Harmon on May 28, 2008 | Reply
Jet,
That’s obviously a consideration that they need to take into account but being libertarians, who have no ideological problems about self-defense, and rich, giving them a wide choice of defense mechanisms and weaponry, I wouldn’t think that piracy would be an insurmountable problem.
By Paul Merda on May 28, 2008 | Reply
They even talked about piracy stating that there would not be as large an incentive… Large container ship with $10 million in cargo and 10 crew members vs a platfrom with hundreds of people and $10 million in loot; which would you attack?
By Badtux on May 28, 2008 | Reply
Uhm, flying a flag of convenience is what an Exxon tanker is doing when it’s flying a Liberian flag. It has nothing to do with the nationality of the people actually on the ship, the nationality of the people who own the ship, or passports. The crews of the Chevron oil tanker fleet don’t qualify for Bahaman passports just because their oil tankers are flagged in the Bahamas. It’s just that if it’s flagged in the Bahamas it doesn’t have to comply with U.S. regulations — it has to comply with Bahaman ones, which are pretty much non-existent.
In short, if it’s just a ship flagged in the Bahamas, it’s not exactly a “micro-state” by any real-world meaning of the term. Micro-states such as Vatican City have actual passports and diplomatic recognition by most of the world, as well as a real mechanism for sustenance (selling belief in an invisible sky demon to the world’s masses). The only advantage of living on the S.S. Libertopia rather than moving to the Bahamas is that you don’t need a Bahaman visa to live on the S.S. Libertopia. You just need money to pour into a hole in the water. (”Boat (n): A device for pouring money into a hole in the water”. Well known as such by any boat owners out here). And if an Aegis cruiser pulled alongside while you were on the high seas and hosed down your deck with .50 caliber machine gun fire then sent in a hundred marines with rifles and axes to smash up your ship looking for some non-existent violation of U.S. law, you’d still be just as SOL as if a SWAT team broke down your front door and started smashing your furniture and ripping up your carpets and smashing holes in the wall looking for pot. The U.S. security state doesn’t obey laws, its jackboots go where they want to go and do what they want to do without so much as an apology if they don’t find what they’re looking for.
In short, if I’m going to pour money into a hole, I’ll build a swimming pool. Pouring money into a hole in the ground is still a whole lot cheaper than pouring money into a hole in the water, and the end result is the same, so why bother?
By Badtux on May 28, 2008 | Reply
PS: If an Aegis cruiser wants to sink a platform, consider it sunk. Sort of like Fallujah after the U.S. got through pounding it into rubble with thousands of pounds of bombs, except smaller scale. Taking on the U.S. military straight-up is madness, no matter how Libertarian you are, because the U.S. military doesn’t “fight fair”. If they are getting sniped at from a building — or a platform — they don’t go in and clear the building room to room. No. They back off, call in an airstrike, and turn it into rubble and pink mist. Or into rubble at the bottom of an ocean, in the case of a pesky platform that dares fire a few RPG’s at its Marines — the Marines withdraw, the platform is gone shortly thereafter, and the U.S. government laughs at the laments of the relatives of the deceased.
By Jet Netwal on May 28, 2008 | Reply
I can see pirates just picking off the incoming supply ships and doing pretty well for themselves. It wouldn’t be pretty on the “platform of libertarian uptopia” once supplies grew short.
To be frank, living on a platform, a finite space capable of sustaining a finite number of people of whom only a percentage can function as security (there ARE other jobs that have to be handled) seems pretty stupid to me. That crap only works in James Bond movies, and then only if you pony up the ticket money planning to suspend belief.
A libertarian is just an anarchist with cash.
By Badtux on May 28, 2008 | Reply
Real anarchists laugh at libertarians and call them “capito-anarchists”. Both Libertarians and anarchists have the same basic problem though — while they perceive the problem of power, their response (tear down the power structures of the world) simply transfers that power to the most vicious and most venal, those who are willing and able to unflinchingly kill. Most of us are reluctant to use violence against others. We are always at a disadvantage to those who are willing to use violence at a hatpin when it comes to a gunfight, because we have compunctions about pulling the trigger, we want to make sure we’re shooting the right person, that the person we’re shooting *really* wants to kill us, etc. The evil ones out there… no. They shoot first and do *not* ask questions later. And they will rule the world if we don’t form a collective (let’s call it something like, say, “government”!) and bribe some of them to work for *us* instead of free-lancing (we can call them “police officers”!) in order to defend *us* from *them* (those other violent vicious goons, who would remove from us our lives, liberty, and property).
Of course, the problem then always becomes, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Keeping our own goons from turning their guns on *us* rather than on those other goons, the goons we’re paying them to deal with, always is a problem.