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Comment by byrneseyeview | Hacker News Reader

They could use overlapping corporate jurisdictions. If you don't like how things are being run, you pay someone else to enforce your contracts. You might have different service providers for, say, IP versus personal safety versus family law. And since they'd compete, it would allow people to coexist with wildly different legal regimes. You could have a drug-prohibiting regime (or even one that fines you for alcohol consumption) -- but your neighbors might not.

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I don't think starting a new country with a new, untested system, which people don't know a lot about, will work well. I often advocate for anarcho-capitalism, but only as the result of an existing system being changed one step at a time. This gives time for any bugs/kinks to be worked out at each step, and for people to gain a better understanding of what it means.

Do you see the current system's bugs being worked out any time soon?

Not really. We work out a few, here and there. But if people don't know how to improve on our system, why would a new system make them smarter? I think living at sea won't suddenly make people good at fixing bugs.

Maybe your plan is only to let the smart people join you, and hope they will all agree? I think that sort of plan is hopeless, both in figuring out who are the smart people, and then in getting them to agree. Intelligent libertarians disagree about large stuff all the time.

I'd say for every bug we work out we create about 100 new bugs that lead further away from freedom. Starting over is sometimes exactly what a "legacy" system needs to get better.

Intelligent libertarians disagree all the time, the difference is they don't resort to violence or coercion to force their views on others. It's the whole point of creating a truly free society like the Seasteading movement is trying to do.

So, what do you think of the French Revolution?

I don't see the parallel. The violent overthrow of a monarchy vs. a bunch of argumentative sea-steading libertarians?

You are advocating a "clear out the cobwebs and start from scratch" utopian vision, and arguing that gradual improvement does not work (which implies that existing institutions ought to be destroyed since they are somewhat coercive and reform is impossible. This implies violence). That's what the French Revolution was about, too.

The difference is that seasteading makes the current system unsustainable; it doesn't storm Alcatraz and spread stories about Michelle Obama saying "Let them eat Arugula!" If the French revolutionaries had simply left, and created a French-speaking country that ran itself more effectively than Monarchist France, it would be comparable.

But seasteading also (theoretically) uses new technology, which makes starting a country radically cheaper the way Moore's law and open-source software make starting a company so much cheaper.

There is a philosophical issue here about gradual progress vs revolutionary/utopian change. Do you have any thoughts on this issue?

The French Revolutionaries, Edmund Burke, Karl Popper, and others had thoughts on this issue which are relevant.

Whether you want sea steading to have philosophical relevance or not, it does. Which side of this particular debate do you think it is on and why? Do you see that as a problem or a merit?

I don't know what Popper or Burke have said about starting from scratch vs. evolving the existing, (I'd be interested in reading it if you've got a reference) but the French revolutionaries seem to be a bad comparison. The whole reason for sea steading is that libertarians aren't willing set up fortifications and overthrow the government of New Hampshire. Non-violence is a key philosophical difference.

What Thiel is saying is that the chance evolving the current system into something even vaguely libertarian falls somewhere between extremely unlikely and absolutely impossible at this point. Maybe there's room for arguing that evolving the government is possible, but the natural course is growth. There are few (I can't think of any) historical examples of government moving in the other direction.

If evolving the current system is ruled out, then considering something as revolutionary as starting from scratch like the seasteaders, while maybe less than optimal, doesn't seem so far-fetched either philosophically or morally.

Karl Popper: The Open Society and Its Enemies

Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France (long out of copyright, you can google for the full text)

I am not trying to compare sea steading to storming the Bastille. I'm trying to point out that your ideology has a lot in common with theirs. You seem to agree with me that the French Revolution was bad. Great. But that does not remove your commonality. I urge you to take your similarity to them as a danger sign, and to learn more about it, and to get a clear idea of where you think they were right and wrong, and how you will do differently. A plan like "Well, I just won't use violence" is not good enough. Many people involved in the revolution did not want or intend violence. It happened anyway. Why? Because utopianism leads to violence, and because our society has knowledge and institutions that prevent violence which should not be destroyed or abandoned.

I also think you should consider carefully what is preventing reform in the US. It is not democracy, which Thiel seems to think is his enemy. It is not the Government. If enough people want change, they can get it. (In fact they just voted in a President promising change.) The real problem is people with bad ideas, isn't it? If only most people had better ideas, change would come quickly.

The only reliable way to deal with bad ideas is to learn how to persuade people of good ideas, not to start over and try to exclude everyone you judge to have bad ideas. (And what happens if some of your kids have ideas you consider bad? Or some existing members of the society change their mind? You will need persuasion.) Attempting persuasion has the added bonus that sometimes you will find out you were mistaken, not the other guy, and change your mind.

Few would sign up for a regime that prevented only their use of drugs. One would either sign up for a regime that didn't care about drugs, or one that punished others for using drugs, as a moral crusade.

A regime that punished people outside of its jurisdiction would not last very long. It would be the equivalent to what a war is today.

I suspect that people would join such a regime for religious reasons. If you're the only member of your congregation who chooses not to be punished for having a beer, not having a kid, flipping a light switch on the Sabbath, etc., your peers may take note and decide you're not really serious.

Well, more equivalent to crime, but yeah. What I was implying is that it costs money to punish drug use, so jurisdictions would tend to ignore it unless explicitly requested.

Churches would probably become jurisdictions, rendering that kind of mismatch moot. And hey, if some people require that much institutional pressure to avoid addictive traps, I'm certainly not one to argue (as long as it's not forced onto others).

Walk me through the mechanics of a hypothetical market for IP law service providers.

Who sells what to whom?

The imaginary property industry would look pretty much like it does now, but the content cartels would be hiring goons with bats instead of goons with law degrees.

There are a couple possibilities. One is a legal regime that separates copy-rights from use-rights. One would be a system for letting people selectively share trade secrets without risking someone else making the same product.

Essentially, they would enforce voluntary constriants on future actions, when those actions are made possibly by access to information known by another party. This amounts to a property right, though like our current property rights regime, it is relying on a legal fiction as a useful abstraction.

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