Silicon Valley billionaire funding creation of artificial libertarian islands

Bad Bowtie

Bad Bowtie

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Wasn't sure where this belonged, but it does have a political flavor to it, and the discussion might go as such, so I figured I'd just leave it here. Mods/admins, feel free to move.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout...artificial-libertarian-islands-140840896.html

Pay Pal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine.

Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch--free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be "a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons."

"There are quite a lot of people who think it's not possible," Thiel said at a Seasteading Institute Conference in 2009, according to Details. (His first donation was in 2008, for $500,000.) "That's a good thing. We don't need to really worry about those people very much, because since they don't think it's possible they won't take us very seriously. And they will not actually try to stop us until it's too late."

The Seasteading Institute's Patri Friedman says the group plans to launch an office park off the San Francisco coast next year, with the first full-time settlements following seven years later.

Thiel made news earlier this year for putting a portion of his $1.5 billion fortune into an initiative to encourage entrepreneurs to skip college.

Another Silicon Valley titan, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced in June that he would be funding the "Clock of the Long Now." The clock is designed to keep ticking for 10,000 years, and will be built in a mountain in west Texas.
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I predict a rousing success.*


//Sarcasm alert.
 
It's an interesting idea. It's the political equivalent of building an operating system from scratch with no legacy code restrictions (except for the ones that the participants bring in). I say good on them; it's their own money, they can do what they want. If something good comes out, great, if not, no loss to the rest of us. This is true social science, emphasis on the science part.
 
Ooh, interesting. Hopefully it's more impressive than Sealand. Which isn't hard really
800px-Sealandafterfire2.JPG
 
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Building codes and minimum wage? What kind of economy and industry can you even have on an oil rig type platform? There's, umm, fishing, and I guess the internet, not that the internet cares about nations in the first place, and relying on investors to buy things from land lubbers. I don't get it.

Does everyone start out with the same amount of Anarchy Bucks and then they all pay each other and whoever has the most after a year wins?
 
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If you're a billionaire, you create an island 500 feet below the sea, and try to take over the world.
Thats billionaire 101.
 
I just want to know who they call when it all goes wrong.
 
Good luck.
 
Pretty sure the communes, collective and squats of the past 30 years have done this concept to death.

It's all good fun until it inexplicably turns into a dystopian hell hole.
 
The difference is that the communes were community directed. Towards socialism, and a community ideal where people worked together. The whole concept was to forget about the whole concept of property and share everything.

Libertarianism is not exactly socialism. It's about property and nothing else, pretty much. It's about the freedom to use your property and (by extension) your body in the way you want, with as little intereferrance as possible. There are things that are similar, I suppose this Libertarian society will have relaxed laws on drugs, and the general idea of liberalism, and libertarianism by extension, is to leave people alone. So to be a true libertarian society, they can't restrict anyone for any reason other than to protect life and property. So goodbye to any moralism outside the family, in other words.

So, there are similarities. Communes and the likes tried to drop a lot of the morals they deemed bourgeoisie. Free sex is just one example. In that way, both ideas relate somewhat to anarchism, but in different ways. Anarchism is about the absense of rules, so it's not socialism. It's also about the absense of property. So it's not liberalism.

To be honest, both ideas will fail miserably. Not because they are ugly, both are beautiful ideas. But they are not realistic, they are, to put not to fine a point to it, impossible. They don't take human nature into account.

:)
 
Perhaps they'll attach some sails, put on some silly costumes and sail to Tortuga?
 
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