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Comment by sbt | Hacker News Reader

Something tells me these guys are more motivated by tax evasion than by saving the environment.

If you are always buying groceries at the store next door, and one day find a store with better prices, would buying from the new store be "payment evasion"? The same applies to governments if your current one doesn't provide the service you need you have all the rights to try to find a better one. And whether you move to an existing country or try to create a new one doesn't make a big difference.

This is disingenuous. The store next door isn't providing you with any services beyond the grocery transactions you engage in. A country, on the other hand, largely does. If you actually move from one country to another legitimately, cut ties with the former, and engage solely with the services of the latter, then no one's going to accuse you of tax evasion either. Governments are much less transactional than it's often popular to make them out to be, because there are whole lot of background, foundational services that they provide the people seem to like to pretend simply appear out of thin air.

> cut ties with the former, and engage solely with the services of the latter, then no one's going to accuse you of tax evasion either.

If your worry is that an existing government will allow some rich people to register as living on seastead and not pay taxes, then this doesn't have anything to do with seastead, and is only a failure of the government. If US allowed such a scheme there would not be any need to build a seastead, any corrupt government in any small country would be happy to provide all that is needed for a fraction of the cost.

On the other hand very similar thing is already happening in places like Russia where families of many government officials live in US and Europe using the money stolen back in home. (One city mayor even got a US green card requiring to live half of the year in the US, at the same time keeping his post and giving speeches on how bad is USA).

> because there are whole lot of background, foundational services that they provide the people seem to like to pretend simply appear out of thin air.

That is because the services that governments provide are bundled, which makes it hard for people to see what is the foundational service they are paying for and which is something that no one wants but has to buy because some bureaucrat 50 years ago managed to pass a law. Experiments with seastead governments would help to make the bundles more explicit.

Sure, but I think OP is referring to avoiding future taxes as still tax evasion, even if all current debts are settled.

Seasteading is not motivated by environmental concerns , but mainly by libertarian concerns to escape regulations and governments. How would they evade taxes in international territory where there are no taxes?

[edit since i m blocked from replying]:

- US is unique in taxing worldwide income. I would assume the colonists would renounce any other citizenship anyway, and the colony does not have taxes.

- They could not move any financial assets or to the colony unless it is somehow recognized internationally. There is no way to evade taxes.

- The only possible way to tranfer assets is to convert them to cryptocurrency , which presumably would only be useful in the colony. And there 's probably not going to be a way to move large sums of money out of the colony, unless international banks agree to cooperate with it.

[and a tangent]

It's "interesting" to contrast the reactions of HN 2019 compared to 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=194028

They would evade taxes from moving from where they currently live (and pay those taxes, which they're not able to evade via fancy constructs) to "Nowhere Land" where they (apparently) are not taxed at all.

Alas, "Nowhere Land" may figure at one point that they need to generate income for basic maintenence and other necessary expenses. Basic maintenance, which can be very, very costly out at sea.

There are taxes in international waters. If you are a US citizen you owe income tax no matter where you earn your income. Hiding your income and not paying income tax is evading taxation.

https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/taxp...

The founder of the Seasteading Institute, Patri Friedman (son David Friedman and grandson of Milton Friedman), is a libertarian anarchist. So yeah, undermining the concept of the nation-state is really built into the DNA of the whole venture. It goes beyond tax avoidance.

He's an anarcho-capitalist, which has little in common with most strains of historical anarchism, despite the name.

Sorry to detract from your main point, but how is it possible to be an anarchist and a libertarian at the same time? Those are fairly mutually exclusive based on my understanding.

The libertarian type of anarchism is called anarcho-capitalism.

It's based on property rights and the non aggression principle.

Have to chime in here, since I once studied the history of anarchism as a social/economic/political movement.

Anarchism was overwhelmingly a socialist movement, contemporary with Marxism and communism. Many anarchists debated the ideal forms of socialism vigorously at congresses held by groups like the First International. Historically, Marxism and communism won the most mindshare, with rare exceptions like the Spanish Civil War.

Leading 19th c. anarchist thinkers, like Bakunin and Kropotkin, would have laughed you out of the room if you had claimed anarchism was in any way not a leftist movement.

This conception is from a much later argument of economist Murray Rothbard from the mid-20th c., and owes more to the Austrian school of economics then any strain of anarchist thinking. Rothbard drew upon some individualist anarchist writers, but tossed out all the economic parts he disagreed with, and called it anarcho-capitalism. Claiming anarcho-capitalism as a form of anarchism reveals a complete misreading of, or disdain for, the overwhelming majority of anarchist thought.

Now for an interesting follow-up: the term "libertarian" underwent the same change in America, but even more thoroughly, to the point that only historians recall its leftist origins. (Outside America, "libertarian" is more synonymous with anarchism.)

To quote Rothbard above: "One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, 'our side,' had captured a crucial word from the enemy... 'Libertarians'... had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over..."

There's Anarchism as the social/economical/political movement and then there's anarchism as the greek word for "no leader/government"...

Anarcho-capitalism is not a type of the former, but it is a type of the later.

That's not what anarcho-capitalists mean when they use the word "anarchism", though. They are explicitly claiming a relationship to 19th c. socialist anarchism, not that "linguistic analysis means this word used elsewhere should also apply to our unrelated ideas".

There's a famous account on Reddit of a naïve US anarcho-capitalist kid hanging out with Greek anarchists. Things don't end well for the ancap!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarcho_Capitalism/comments/3ucp8y/...

It's impossible to mention anarcho-capitalism in a non-ancap forum without more traditional anarchists coming in and screaming into the wind that anarcho-capitalism isn't real anarchism. In the end, the normies don't know enough about the debate to have an opinion, or care, or even realize it exists, and the ancaps don't care what the socialist anarchists think on the matter.

The whole debate feels like a fruitless exercise to reclaim territory that is long lost.

You're not wrong in your analysis, but as a student of Orwell, I object strenuously to the idea that the fight over what words mean is pointless.

Perhaps linguistic territory could be recaptured with seasteading?

How do they deal with the unquestionable fact that aggression exists?

I think they propose voluntarily subscribed-to private cops/legal jurisdictions with either voluntarily subscribed-to arbitration contracts for inter-jurisdictional conflicts or insurance payouts for when some one who subscribes to no jurisdiction (or one with no arbitration agreement with yours) stabs/robs/whatevers you.

Basically as it is now but instead of the law and tax being collected based on location, you get to freely choose what law(s)-enforcement you want to be under.

>you get to freely choose what law(s)-enforcement you want to be under

Until someone under a different LE company accuses of a crime. Then you'll be subject to their process (unless, of course, your LE company has more guns).

Well the hardcore version is that the different LE company can't subject you to their process unless you consent and if you didn't the restitution for whatever crime they say you committed would be paid for by their own insurance company.

why would you ever agree then? Well maybe because they have an agreement with your LE company and you'd find yourself dropped as a client if you didn't or you both use the same insurance company and they'd jack up your rates if you didn't. More extremely you might be fired and become unhireable as a liability and unless you already have sufficient arable land to subsistence farm you will die of starvation or be shot for trespassing (initiating force) on the sidewalk that you can no longer pay for the use of.

Don't take this as me thinking it is at all a workable scheme also I'm definitely not AnCap and I don't hang out in their circles so this kinda just the low-nuance version that I've picked up via osmosis.

It's a lot of mental gymnastics that serve as a "reductio ad absurdam" argument, proving that the fundamental organizing axiom of human societies is still "might makes right" rather than "right is derived from mutually-agreed-upon moral principles".

The last arguments of kings are still guns.

The end state of all theoretical non-aggressive libertarian societies is that they are conquered through force by some form of cartel. In my opinion, seasteading, which is predicated on mutual non-aggression for prosperity, is strictly inferior to hiring a bunch of ex-CIA and ex-GRU contractors to destabilize and take over a pre-existing dictatorial country, and then rewrite its laws from scratch. The moral high ground loses to boots on the ground, every time.

If you can't or won't preemptively attack and annex another country's territory, you're better off trying to colonize space, where nation-states can't reach you as easily, or start by building the nuclear warheads, and then build the floating cities. The veneer of civilization is thin, and one gun is no longer sufficient for one man to defend his castle.

I wonder at what age one would voluntarily to subscribe to these contracts (at birth?), and who would observe, notarize and attest to the subscription and track compliance with all the permutations of its finalized terms?

Obligatory Blockchain woo preemption:

"The agent's model of what you are interested in would always be a cartoon, and in return you will see a cartoon version of the world through the agents eyes" - Jaron Lanier

Read 'Snow Crash' and pay special attention to the police forces and prison operators

The non-aggression principle means that you shouldn't start the aggression, it doesn't mean that you can't defend yourself.

Which sounds uncontroversial, but there are devils in detailing what constitutes aggression.

I remember a libertarian telling me once that they believed it was unethical to start a war in order to free slaves, because violence is only ok in self defence and the slaves could rise up on their own.

That's not in line with the NAP. Slaves are by definition the subjects of aggression since they have been stripped of their natural self-ownership right. So it is definitely not unethical to help them.

To my mind, "not in line with" implies that it'd motivate violation of the principle. It seems like it's rather a stricter (... which doesn't necessarily mean better or worse) standard than the NAP (or at least the most common interpretations of it).

I'm no expert, but I believe that the historical response is "yar, matey"

In other words: bigger guns

Opposition to age of consent laws for minors engaging in sexual activity is also a popular cause among the ancaps.

If you think anarcho-capitalism is weird, read about Anarcho-communism[1]. It always seemed intuitive to me that collectivism and anarchism were mutually exclusive, but apparently that's not the case.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-communism

You can prepend "anarcho-" to just about any "-ism" and find someone willing to explain how it would work in theory while decrying the lack of experimental evidence due to opposition by nation-states.

I'd call myself an "anarcho-pragmatist" now. That's based on not wasting breath or effort on stuff that's almost guaranteed not to work. My current recommendations to like-minded individuals are to support labor unions (or invent some other institution that counters plutocratic trends), and to oppose consolidation of broadcast media. I have long ago abandoned the non-aggression principle as being too dependent on people arguing over the meaning of "aggression".

Anarchism was a 19th c. socialist movement, and anarcho-communism was one of its main strains, if not the biggest. Given its origins, it shouldn't be a surprise that anarchism is collectivist.

Anarcho-communism is contrasted by anarcho-syndicalism, which argued for unions/industries being the organizing principle rather than communes/towns.

You can find out more about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism

relevant subreddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/GoldandBlack/

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