The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
If this sounds like a dorky joke post, it's not.
Isn't this literally motivated by the same neo-fuedal oligarchical narcissism that made the bad guy in BioShock build essentially the same thing as this? Tell me one of these "seasteads" won't get hit by some speedboat pirates and decide OK, we're gonna arm up and hey why not build down? And you know what? No one's gonna say we can't do human experiments on our residents, so why not? As long as they sign their names to it.
Just stay in Palo Alto or whatever, and pay your god damned taxes. This is bleak, bleak stuff.
“Do I want to create the first venture-backed city-state? Hell yeah”
Ahem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_Indies
And we all know how well that turned out for the locals.
In fact it's what the whole idea of "smashing the state" has been about all along.
Also, this story is wild: https://theintercept.com/2019/05/03/erik-prince-trump-uae-pr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State
Nope, there's absolutely nothing that could go wrong here.
The 90% death rate in the first two years is really impressive.
It's a governance mode that was heavily used throughout the European colonial period and it resulted in the rape and theft of the local populations and underclasses of all the nations involved. When you put things in the proper historical context, the hostility is rather well-reasoned.
Unless you're a victim of human trafficking. Or, for example, read up on how scientologists use their cruise ship [1].
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/03/world/scientology-cruise-ship...
What happens when you move there and some local strongman with the most weapons decides he needs slaves? Government exists because the majority of people got tired of being hassled by warlords, and they got banded together to create and enforce laws they could all abide by or one warlord was able to create a stable coalition for a time by taking responsibility for the justice of the land.
Why would anyone in their right mind, other than a warlord-wannabe billionaire, assent to this idea?
Maybe they won't. You are, in a certain sense, assenting to it right now. Websites have exactly this governance model. Hacker News is run by a king. We all choose to spend time here anyway, because he does a good job responding to our needs.
A lot of things work this way, in fact. When you go to a restaurant, you don't get to vote on the menu. You order what's there, but you choose which restaurants you patronize. There is no, in principle, reason that the same cannot be applied to where you choose to live.
The primary difference is the transaction costs of relocation and the cost of mistakes. It's easy to go to a different restaurant if you don't like the menu. It's less easy to move. But some people are willing to make that tradeoff for more efficient governance.
The original question I responded to is "why the fear of opt-in competition to the current model of governance?"
The answer is that meaning of "efficient" can vary widely depending on who wields power. At our current evolutionary state communalism works up to about 150 people. Beyond that, you need a higher level of government, and historically that means some form of authoritarian government. Since this idea is being proposed by tech-funded billionaires, I can apply a filter to history to glean some insight as to what happens when a group of wealthy sociopaths are given absolute rule over a state. Since I value popularly elected, republican forms of government and free markets empowered by organized labor, I would naturally oppose an experiment that will very obviously lead to more autocracy, servitude, and exploitation by billionaires seeking to bestow feudal fiefs on themselves.
Yes, indeed. That is the essential question for Patchwork-based ideologies. However, that is something they actively try to think about
> The answer is that meaning of "efficient" can vary widely depending on who wields power. At our current evolutionary state communalism works up to about 150 people. Beyond that, you need a higher level of government, and historically that means some form of authoritarian government. Since this idea is being proposed by tech-funded billionaires, I can apply a filter to history to glean some insight as to what happens when a group of wealthy sociopaths are given absolute rule over a state. Since I value popularly elected, republican forms of government and free markets empowered by organized labor, I would naturally oppose an experiment that will very obviously lead to more autocracy, servitude, and exploitation by billionaires seeking to bestow feudal fiefs on themselves.
Ok, but how exactly does an experiment lead to that? If that is the outcome that it generates, and people do not prefer that outcome, then they simply will not move there. So, if you are correct in your diagnosis, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. The only thing you do have to worry about is discovering that your preconceptions were not accurate.
In addition, the eventual children of the people who moved there won't have made this choice, and the example of history says they won't easily be able to leave.
>A lot of things work this way, in fact. When you go to a restaurant, you don't get to vote on the menu. You order what's there.
The problem isn't that someone else might choose something for you. That's not what anyone is worried about here. An incredibly silly comparison.
The environment they are trying to set up makes them unaccountable and undemocratic, capable of entrapping and exploiting people to no end. The potential actual consequences are infinitely greater than condiment selection.
> The environment they are trying to set up makes them unaccountable and undemocratic, capable of entrapping and exploiting people to no end. The potential actual consequences are infinitely greater than condiment selection.
Explain to me what you think the difference between "undemocratic" and "people choosing things for you" is.
Do you understand that if these types of fiefdoms are built, they will be able to attract people with misleading claims or by dangling short-term economic relief in front of desperate people who they can then ruthlessly victimize?
Maybe you do, and you just think "ah fuck em"
Which is in character for the types of people who want to start a fiefdom in the ocean.
I'm gonna have to recommend you pick up BioShock, for real. It's on sale for 5 dollars.
Some people like to try new things, and they're ok taking risks to do so. They should be allowed to do that. If you want to make a rule that says "such and such amount of disclosure is required for people moving there", i'd be fine supporting something like that. But just saying "well theoretically it could be exploited in this way" is not a very strong argument against trying it.
This is the environment, as it exists, for hundreds of millions around the world right now. So even if your critiques are true, we're no worse for trying.
Can you list a few historical cities founded under a similar model that had the awful results you claim?
Perhaps the problem is humans, not a particular system of government.
Honestly, this is the huge problem of our time - globalization has happened and the concepts of tax laws and taxation of value production haven't properly adapted. The US should be taxing all the value legitimately made in the US - if a designer in the US makes something that is then mass produced in China the value taxes currently only comprehend the physical good value, not the intellectual value of the good - for things like fashionable clothing nearly all of the value is created domestically and the actual material value is inconsequential.
Over time the ability to dodge taxes in this manner has placed unfair downward pressure on countries to lower taxes in an effort to attract the revenue that can be freely moved around and hence we've got spiraling wealth inequality due to insufficient taxation.
People opting out of taxation while reaping the benefit of educated populations (or their personal education) along with security and the laundry list of the benefits of society is simply ethically unacceptable.
Only because the laborers are being horrendously underpaid, no? If globalization had really fully happened you wouldn't be able to pay people in china slave labor wages to make your clothes for you.
And yea, I think we do have some twisted and perverse version of globalization - rather than bringing the world up we seem to be perpetually exploiting the third world... eventually that might piss of the third world enough that they do something about that but it hasn't happened yet.
We still have centuries of third world countries to exploit until they are fully developed.
It's a gradient from country to country. Overall, for individuals in absolute terms, things are getting better- although for certain subpopulations in relative terms (e.g. blue collar americans) they've gotten worse.
The point is to improve life for the 99% of the world who can't just move to a tax haven, by building prosperous cities they can move to. This is not just a theory - China lifted 500,000,000 out of poverty using Special Economic Zones to transform their economy over decades. Many countries aspire to the same advance in prosperity for their people.
Huge tax loopholes being accepted by central world players like the US puts pressure on smaller countries to accept them as well.
Then people and their taxable assets will gladly stay.
The “good value” should hopefully be a well functioning nation full of healthy and happy people. Unfortunately that’s not the goal of most people with that kind of money.
Perhaps it's mostly selection bias on articles like this one that brings out the comments we see around us?
In my recollection, HN has always been pro-YC and pro-venture-capital-in-general, for obvious reasons :)
Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers' general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers. They may laugh at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate newspeech, but they also laugh at someone who tells them a certain problem can't be solved. Suppress one, and you suppress the other.
http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html
This sort of attitude is definitely not the one held by most coders at BigStartupCo today.
HN culture has always seen multinational companies like Amazon as something to aspire to become, billionaire investors as heroic risk-taker allies, and lauded small companies that get brought out and shut down for achieving an exit.
There's nothing wrong with that, HN's culture is still perfectly valid. But HN hasn't lost an anti-authority ethos, it never had one, from the moment the URL ended with ycombinator.com
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2917810/elephant-man-drug-test...
There aren't any open positions higher up, and you aren't exactly a top performer. The only way I see you digging out of this is signing up for the Human Initiative Project. A couple injections a week, plus your regular salary, and you'll have more than enough scrip.
Don't believe the rumors, you'll be just fine.
People are free to leave, if they don't like living in the special economic zone.
And people are able to freely leave them, lol.
This one would be literally run by the UK. I don't think the modern day UK is going to be holding people against their will, in their country. People are able to freely leave the UK, whenever they want.
Another interesting contrast to your hypothetical is that in the US people are free to volunteer for paid clinical trials. Yet somehow you imagine the proposed alternative to be entirely malicious...
Just stay on Earth or whatever, and fix your god damned environment. Settling the Solar System - how dare you? Tell me one of those space ships won't get hit by an asteroid.
I mean, heck, the idea of doing a startup of any kind is dangerously transgressive. If you make new things, something bad might happen! And existing companies might lose customers! There will be change! Chaos! Mayhem!
Or - crazy idea here - perhaps we could have the courage to not let the plot of a video game limit our social innovation?
Or, if that's the only metric you have, at least pick the right game - SimCity!
Settling the solarsystem would be neat. It won't do anything to fix climate changes or overpopulation. It's not even possible in principle, let alone practice to remove significant quantities of people from the gravity well.
Creating lawless zones for the specific purpose of fiefdom isn't new, entrepreneurial or even particularly imaginative. Unless you count the villains of Connery era James Bond as novel entrepreneurs.
Just where do you think these marvelously useful, livable but mysteriously uninhabited "vacant tracts of land in developing countries" will come from.
A small, incremental degree of privatization. I have no idea where you get "lawless" or "fiefdom". These zones are requested, authorized, regulated, and monitored by a nation. Do you think the 3,000 SEZs in the world are lawless fiefdoms?
This is strangely hyperbolic language for what's basically a new kind of free trade zone. Would make a good movie plot, though, you've got a grand imagination!
That's a bit of an overstatement. I expect if that were true, people wouldn't have kept on coming.
After reading few books from the period and later ones by Nathaniel Hawthorne, I don't think so.
> I expect if that were true, people wouldn't have kept on coming.
The people coming could have incomplete or incorrect information. Communication was slow back then. Separating fact from falsehoods about the New World would have been a crapshoot at best.
Even an entirely country got it wrong. Scotland bankrupted itself on the Darien scheme.
That’s of course ignoring the post apocalyptic lives of the natives that survived successive waves of disease and collapse radiating out from points of contact, but it’s habit at this point.
Orbital habitats, formed by disassembling the moon, on the other hand, can give us vastly more habitable area than available on Earth, and the environment can be engineered to be better than Earth ever was.
Recently I’ve become convo bed that other planets don’t have much of a role to play in our future except as a source of raw materials.
Space exploration is more like Amazon spending $100B to build a hut with 10 Arduinos on the summit of Mt. Everest.
Is the movement so narcissistic that the very existence of the people already living there is not even noticed? Is this hypothetical country a place where you ruthlessly steal from the original people to make a state where private property is the only right? Because "bleak" is the exact word that describes the lives of the millions of people who don't even show up on libertarian radar.
And "hypothetical"is the right word because there were taxes and regulation form America's earliest beginnings. And, fortunately, it protected more rights than just property. Indeed, the founding fathers intentionally _removed_ the word "property" from the original phrase "life liberty and the pursuit of property"
If there are any analogies to North America, it would either be the Puritans who had shockingly strict ideological requirements on their members or plantation owners who lived by laws completely different than their slaves. Because we know these libertarian colonists are not going to be building their own log cabins or personally work "their" land. Startups are those bootstrapped farms and self built log cabins. Likewise space exploration. But colonialism, when it isn't simply theft, is rent seeking and always at best zero-sum-gain.
>not let the plot of a video game limit our social innovation
"Bioshock" is apparently a necessary comparison because its plot is clearly more accurately known North American history evidently.
I mean... yeah? There was famine and then genocide, then slavery?
In this case, because 'video games'. Perhaps if readers had more curiosity they might be interested to investigate the topic of voluntarism, free-association and economic theory. This is not to say that there is no room to disagree with the aforementioned ideas.
However, I feel disappointed that the most prominent comment here forgoes literacy and logic in lieu of hyperbole while citing the plot of a video game.
Intellectual curiosity indeed.
No. What will happen is that the authorities will arrest the pirates, or whoever.
All of this is being done within the bounds of the law. So I am not sure why people are bringing up ridiculous hypotheticals.
Special economic zones are not a new thing. And they have worked out fine in many places.
There have been a number of low tax, rule of law city states like Hong Kong and Singapore that did rather well and provided a refuge for many Chinese when China was going a bit nuts under Mao and the like. It's not all bleak.
Singapore specifically is an example people use to illustrate the inherent flaws of the Democracy Index rating system. This is a country with low press freedom, one ruling party that sues the opposition into bankruptcy for "defamation" to prevent any loss of power, and oh, they execute people for carrying drugs.
Sure, it is obvious when spelt out, but it is less obvious when it is a game of implications.
Maybe "government" as we know it today is a just a "fashionable solution" - to riff on pg's earlier essay.
Not really. There is this one interesting thing called the US Military. If necessary, anyone deemed enough of a threat can either be droned, or black-bagged by Seal Team 6.
Aside from taxes, most other laws exist to prevent one harming another. If someone goes to an island in the ocean, why ought we to care what he does there? To put it differently: many cities have regulations against shooting off fireworks due to safety concerns. Few rural counties do, because while people can still harm themselves, there aren't too many others nearby to injure.
Many rural counties have them as well. In fact entire states have rules against fireworks.
Outside of places where wildfires are likely, firework ordinances are often there to prevent the people who are shooting the fireworks from hurting themselves.
>If someone goes to an island in the ocean, why ought we to care what he does there?
In an extreme case lets say a billionaire starts his own island nation, convinces people to move there to work for him, and eventually enslaves his workers and their children. This isn't an unlikely scenario--look at guest workers from SE Asia in the Middle East. What starts off as voluntary can quickly become involuntary.
We have enough powerful people in the world with no checks on their authority. We don't need to create more.
From a more practical concern, what's the upside to existing countries? The new island nation will only admit productive people, and will likely try to ship unproductive people back to their country of origin.
In any case, that's yet another reason we shouldn't allow American citizens to set up their own private countries.
Also, hiring for service jobs might be hard :)
And some of those members aren't afraid of using them, or their Navys, or Air Forces...
Items of interest:
Article 88: Reservation of the high seas for peaceful purposes
Article 98: Duty to render assistance
Article 99: Prohibition of the transport of slaves
Article 100: Duty to cooperate in the repression of piracy
Article 101: Definition of piracy
Article 103: Definition of a pirate ship or aircraft
Article 105: Seizure of a pirate ship or aircraft
The law is very clear on the authority of warships to intervene.
[1]https://www.un.org/Depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unc...
If it's done by henchmen, we're no longer in the "billionaires only" city state that I'm making fun of.
"sipping well water at his mountaintop compound south of San Jose"
"He also says, with a straight face, "
Next up they're going to say lex luthor bald head and evil villain laugh.
----
The principle has been done before. It's similar to free trade economic zones in other countries, shenzen is one example, or reproducing something like HK or Singapore in other areas of the world.
Experimental governments on Earth are limited by the fact that [large state power] can invade you in a matter of hours for arbitrary reasons, no matter where you on are the planet. Fly off into the deep cosmos, though, and your chances of survival dramatically increase.
Leaving aside how self-sustaining a space colony could ever truly be (Charlie Stross has written a lot about that), in a world as fragile as a space colony would be, I see fascism as vastly more likely than libertarian. If literally anyone can push the a button and kill a substantial percentage of the colony, you have substantially more risk from mental health issues, angry people, etc. than you do here on earth. And that leads to repression and using force to assert control.
Why in the world would you think that the politics of self-sustaining space colonies would not devolve into the exact same (dys)functional states (pun intended) as politics here on earth?
There's a lot of space out there -- the frontier never closes (well, a speed-bump once we fill up the solar system).
So of course individual colonies eventually will fill up, stagnate, and calcify. But we won't run out of land, the way we have on earth, where there's no room for new ideas -- because every useful square foot of land is claimed by a nation-state with guns and rigid ideologies.
More importantly, I don't think the possibility of a bad outcome ought to halt the progress of mankind in perpetuity.
Interesting thought: many suspect nations with frontiers flourish due to having an "escape valve". I am curious to see what an unlimited escape valve will enable.
Can you expand on this? I think I understand the general implication but it’s not something I have considered before. If you have more thoughts/writing on this I’d like to ingest it.
If I understand correctly the idea is “undesirables” can go to a place where they are free to explore their ideas.
* http://www.ditext.com/shannon/shannon.html
* http://www.ditext.com/robbins/robbins.html
* https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/2716011
The obvious issue is that the treatment of Indians was unethical in the case of America, but space exploration might allow us to get many of these benefits of historical colonialism without genocide. I'll admit that I'm biased favorably towards this idea, as the frontier could, in some cases, be much closer to a libertarian utopia than a more heavily-organized society, but the up-side is that it provides options for those who want more and less state control.
Because there's no plausible way we can build one in near/medium future, we aren't constrained by pesky reality, so we can let our imaginations run wild and claim that it will solve the problem of government power and save mankind. And probably also cure cancer.
It's the same pattern as how some startups avoid making money at all cost, so that their valuation can be detached from market reality.
But there will also be colonies that are absolute hell for their inhabitants: institutionalized chattel slavery, legalized pedophilia, animal torture, all manner of non-consensual sexual deviancy.
Just imagine if guys like Jeffrey Epstein could scurry off to their own solar system and build an entire society based on their wants and desires, far from the reach of international justice.
`We can see that fine,' Molly said. `Mountain effect, as it narrows. Ground seems to get higher, more rocky, but it's an easy climb. Higher you climb, the lower the gravity. Sports up there. There's velodrome ring here.' He pointed.
`A what?' Case leaned forward.
`They race bicycles,' Molly said. `Low grav, high-traction tires, get up over a hundred kilos an hour.'"
Well, until something goes wrong and you're in deep space beyond any hope of rescue.
It might help to bring an earth ecosystem with you.
Actually, I wonder if earth will be in danger when space colonies take place, because they will have the "high ground" and be able to drop rocks for basically no cost.
On the other hand, maybe with replicators, the psychology of post-scarcity might change things.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-thailand-seahome/thai-nav...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-libertarian-nirvana-at-sea-ru...
You also need things like a foreign service to liaise with other countries so that the fate of your state isn't the same as the Thai SeaStedding adventure. Then you may also need things in the longer term like social services, pension funds etc to care for your citizens in the long term.
Those all need to be paid for somehow, and that somehow is taxes. A "low tax" environment inevitably has to skimp on those services somehow. I'd guess that these low tax environments intention would be to skimp on the services that richer people don't need in exchange for having those richer people pay less tax...
So I'm not really surprised by the comments in the article that they're having trouble getting "host" countries to buy into this, what's the upside for them? These low tax environments will obviously not provide good long term environments for workers (the low tax is likely to == low social care standards) so it'd seem likely they'll take in workers where it's suitable and ship them back out once they're not productive any more, back to the host countries they came from.
I think this is preception, not reality.
The US was formed with checks and balances amongst the branches of government yet there seems to be no checks and balances against government spending or taxation.
The fact that the Laffer curve[1] is a thing leads me to believe that government will continue to tax until the maximum taxation is achieved, or beyond.
Isn't that circular reasoning? Afaik, the Laffer curve just is a concept that discribes where the maximum tax revenue is (i.e. neither at 0% nor at 100% tax)
I'd guess it's not stable unless you assume all the other trappings of state (like the monopoly on violence) and then you're just some uppity proto-nation practically begging to get subsumed into a more powerful entity.
I might be convinced if the discussion around these new societies they want to build were more focused on egalatarianism. Otherwise, it sounds like the societies they want have already been built and tried around 100 years ago with company towns like Fordlandia.
That said, I actually agree with the critique that at least the Silicon Valley-based "let's rebuild new governance zones from scratch" community tends to have a way too uncritical love of capitalism, and doesn't appreciate the myriad ways in which shareholder voting, and fancy new-age analogues of shareholder voting like coin-holder voting, are terrible. I remember one conversation where we were discussing cryptocurrencies, and one person pointed out how "VC chains" (new blockchains funded by VC firms where a small number of VC firms hold the majority of the tokens) were not being received well around the world, and this person was met with blank stares. But this is a medium-sized ideological disagreement, very far from "these people are just selfish freeloaders".
The technologies could then be developed with less political controversy, and once the technological/practical concerns are ironed out, it would be easier to build a more politically-contested settlement. You would no longer be confronting political and practical obstacles simultaneously.
"project blueseed"
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/03/14/silicon-valley-...
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2012/12/17/16...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migrant_workers_in_the_United_...
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&ei=hjsBXo...
The answer would be high skilled immigrant tech workers who don't have a visa, and want to be near the center of the tech world.
The way that the visa system worked, is that as long as you spend at least half your time, not in the USA, then you would be allowed to enter San Francisco as much as you want, otherwise.
Blue seed would be 12 miles off the coast of SF, so that would be a 30minute to 1 hour commute to the city. Certainly doable.
And Blue seed was advertising cheaper rents than the city to boot!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/08/se...
They tried everything: hosting servers, their own currency, their own crypto. It never really took off, but it was a fun and interesting effort.
It was singlehomed to something that was network topologically indistinguishable from putting servers in a house near the beach on land.
I think there's more than 1 missing piece in these plans.
A rich guy does something good that benefits a large group of people and generates wealth for all those involved, them an external socialist gun-holder neighbor takes issue with this unburdened group next door, and takes it over for the "good of society"
Its happened many many times and it will keep happening until the cost of attacking/stealing is so high as to prevent an outright takeover (only likely in space)
Billionaires now looking for ways to acquire more land? Or to create artificial land on sea? Or to discover new continents or planets with new land? Nothing new under the sun. Guess where all the money acquired from current day monopoly industry ends up in era of zero interest rates and rock bottom innovation. Of course the majority of it is parked in land.
This is not capitalism. This is feudalism. Just rename 'billionaires' to 'aristocracy'.
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/monaco-extension-sea/index...
> For $1 million you can buy just 183 square feet (17 square meters) of prime property, according to the Knight Frank 2017 Wealth Report, compared to 280 square feet (26 square meters) in New York or 323 square feet (30 square meters) in London.
Land in Monaco is more expensive that New York City, but not a LOT more expensive, hah.
We currently have two primary forms of government: dictatorship and democracy.
Almost everyone prefers democracies. But many, if not most, living in democracies also take major issue with the way their countries are run. The best defense of democracy is Churchill's: democracy is the worst form of Government except for all the rest.
A framework in which we can experiment with other forms of societal organization, especially one in which minimizes or eliminates externalities, has the potential to produce massive benefits if it discovers better forms of political organization.
So Two Cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three. Only Love the Beloved Republic deserves that.
- E.M. Forster, "What I Believe", 1939, from a collection bearing the name Two Cheers for Democracy
No, we have a third form: plutocracy.
That's until you realize that representative democracy (rule of majority) is effectively an authoritarian system, which is based on the monopoly of force and the monopoly of currency, and which incentivizes politicians with low time preference to spend more money than what they take (by force) through taxes, therefore indebting and impoverishing the whole population progressively.
There's a social organization system that allows for individual freedoms: free markets with no centralized governments. It's not a setup that will be implemented through revolutions, reforms or good will. It's inevitable that we'll get there as the cost of transactions becomes increasingly small (therefore making centralized systems of organization not viable). Refer to the work of Ronald Coase to understand why that is.
One thing to look for is whether a comment remains anchored in the specific content of an article, or has become unmoored from it. Most of this thread retains at least some contact with it. Even the parent of the comment I replied to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21866584), which is pretty generic, has at least a wispy string connecting it to the OP. But https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21867096 just goes into talking points.
Not sure if i capture your subject currently, but you literally do what the article states, for one.
>>>>>what other means of government are they itching to try exactly?
Why does that matter? If it does to you, should you not research it? The point is that competition will allow the best to replace the garbage we have today. More choice is always better. That is a fact. If you want to know what those choices are, you should inform yourself.
>>>>>And how do you judge the success or failure of each experiment? Its not as hard as you make it out to be. The seasteading project didn't gain traction. Failure. The opposite will be deemed suceess. People vote with their feet. It really is that simple.
>>>how can you possibly eliminate externalities from any such system?
Just because you havent formulated it in your mind, doesnt mean it is not possible. And even if it was not possible, it shouldnt matter. Not everything is black and white. You dont need to eliminate externalities to have something that helps working people live better lives. Eliminating externalities is not the goal
As far as I can tell, what most of these experiments show us is things we already know. E.g., the FLDS mainly seems to demonstrate that patriarchy is indeed awful for everybody except the men on top. [1] A lot of the rest seem to show that however people start, it tends toward familiar things, like oligarchy and dictatorship. So unless these folks have taken special care to avoid the problems, I expect that for-profit communities will end up being the city-state version of Away: high-minded language, an always-positive public face, and a lot of abuse and exploitation behind the scenes.
[1] See "Under the Banner of Heaven" for a readable take: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC1R2S/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
Hate to break it to you, but democracy and dictatorship are not mutually exclusive. See Kenneth Arrow.[1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theo...
Im all for experimenting. I’m not for handing over local legal power to a corporation in one fell swoop because they promise to pay for my taxi as long as I’m in their good books.
No—the immediacy and totality they’re pursuing is the thing that bothers me. Little compromise seems to be offered. They seem to think like vey corporations do—they should be able to “just buy it”. I don’t like that. Not everything is for sale.
Are you referring to buying land from a country? That's a form of cession, and it's certainly not unprecedented (see: Louisiana Purchase). In my eyes, it's the moral way to go about acquiring land, with the alternatives being annexation and conquest.
Under what conditions are you okay with territorial control changing hands? Can land only be sold to other existing governments?
Have a nice holiday.
Edit: it’s one of the first items returned in a search of the subject— https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-sidewalk-la...
Not only that, but the ancient proto-corporations were not partners with government, they were governments.
For about 20 years, the Mississippi Company was worth between $5-7 trillion, adjusted for inflation. That's about 6 Microsofts, and at the time of the Mississippi Company there were many chartered trading companies that ruled over their dominions with iron fists. Microsoft doesn't have a private army.
How did puny little Microsoft/Google/Apple/BP/GE/Chase/whoever/whatever "end" the class war when Standard Oil did not?
In 2008, the American federal government bailed out JP Morgan: https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/jpmorgans-12-billion...
Now you tell me, who's bigger? America has huge companies that are nevertheless tiny in relation to her GDP and government expenditure. America happens to be quite populous, geographically-large, rich in resources, and highly-developed. It stands to reason that she supports many of the world's largest companies.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-sidewalk-la...
Do-it-yourself city-states will be like owning hard metal gold, and for the same reason: once you reach the tipping point of being valuable, you become a target to own/eliminate.
For a more near-fetched, though not precisely analogous example of the this kind of issue, see Deepwater Horizon => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon