A couple of months back when they were trending on twitter there were a lot of people casting doubts over whether they were a real organization. Based on use of stock photos and website domains not lining up. In the sense that they thought it was some elaborate troll, rather than a sincere scam. Though the difference may be mainly academic
Fun San Miguel County, Colorado fact: in 2000, it was Ralph Nader's single strongest county in the entire United States (with 17% of the vote). It is a very woke-left place, exactly the sort of place that might have tolerated an organization like this, so them getting unceremoniously kicked out from *there* really doesn't bode well for them.
I remember hearing about the Free State Project about 15 years ago. I may have vaguely heard the same vague suggestion mentioned here, that several thousand people moved, and some of them even got elected to the gigantic state legislature, but I'd be interested in knowing anything more about how much success they've had at any of their goals. Is there a good place to learn more about this, or should I just read the book about the bear?
There's all sorts of discussions people have about how a bunch of politically motivated people could move to a low population area with overly powerful democratic representation due to something like the electoral college (or New Hampshire's absurdly large legislature) and then use their numbers to somehow Fix Politics. It's seemed to me that the Free State Project is basically the best possible case for this - Libertarians are an unusually privileged political minority, with an unusual commitment to geographic movement for their views, and New Hampshire is a place that is already distinctly appealing to them ideologically, as well as being in congenial commuting distance of a major city. So if Libertarians can't even get control of New Hampshire this way, then there's no hope of Alabama becoming a "Black Quebec" (https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/charles-blows-dream-of-a-black-quebec) or of Democrats moving en masse to Wyoming to get two more Senators. Maybe Georgia could become a "Black Quebec", because Atlanta is already the "Black New York", and Georgia is getting to a partisan tipping point already due to underlying economic effects.
While the libertarians haven't taken over New Hampshire, they have quite a lot of small wins racked up over the years. If you go to https://www.fsp.org/nh/ and scroll down to "Legislative --- Advances for Liberty" you'll see a list.
Big changes tend to run into gubernatorial vetoes, but you can kind of work around that by putting the bill in front of the next governor, over and over again. Constitutional Carry happened that way, pot legalization is probably going to happen the next time a Democrat holds the office.
Would it be fair to characterize the New Hampshire libertarians as being behind the curve? I don't know if those two examples are illustrative, but lots of other states got them first.
It could be either way. At least we know it's the case that many of these same restrictions were also in place in those other states during the lifetime of the free state project (2001 - present).
I've looked over the list of "Advances for Liberty", and it looks quite lackluster. Their keynote achievement is a slight re-structuring of the mechanism by which public money -- you know, the one that comes from taxation -- can be used for education. Their loose restrictions on guns and knives sound impressive, but AFAIK are on par with many other, non-libertarian states. They claim credit for decriminalization of marijuana, which is a real achievement, but it's hard to tell whether they can take any credit for it; certainly, other states beat New Hampshire to it.
Because other states got to the same places by other means, which means there may be little or no advantage to their means (and therefore their project).
The vast majority of those states that already had loose gun and knife restrictions were not in the northeast. And other states in the area are trending in the other direction with guns (knife rights have finally made some advances in NYC).
Also, I hear Vermont, despite its long history of gun friendliness, currently has leadership trying to inch the other direction. Although the population's tendencies remain an obstacle.
New Hampshire just got educational savings accounts. Any family that doesn't send a kid to public school gets the amount of money the state would spend on him (not including the local money), four thousand some dollars a year, to spend on any educational resource — books, tuition, costs of home schooling. The only restriction seems to be an approved provider, but I was told that if you want your neighbor's math major kid to tutor your kid in algebra, you just call up the relevant person and she approves him.
I spent most of a week recently at Porcfest, the Free State Project's big summer event — about two thousand people, many camping, some, including me, staying in nearby motels. It was a lot fun. Largely a young crowd, lots of kids and dogs, very friendly. I suspect that part of what makes FSP work is that if you are a libertarian and move to New Hampshire you have a preexisting social network of people with something in common with you, people to help unload your moving van, answer your questions, point you at a home schooling group, ... Very good feel to it.
That using tax money for private education seems like the biggest and most distinctive achievement.
I'm still skeptical about whether, even with the social network, enough people will be incentivized to move there to actually have measurable effects on politics. My general methodological thought is that when underlying conditions are attractive to people of a particular political bent, that can make meaningful changes in the political conditions, but a group actively deciding to do it is unlikely to make any noticeable difference on top of that.
I guess it's a hard sell to declare that you'll be setting up a dictatorship in someone else's country, probably why an "Unfree State Project" never caught on.
Scott continues to demonstrate his blatant anti-Marx bias through his endorsement of Black Hammer!
(KKKlown Marx is actually pretty funny just from how over the top it is, but I'm not sure what their problem with Shirley Temple is).
Anyway, I love that reparations can now be paid in instalments in exchange for merch, but since that's apparently a thing I can do to wash the blood off my hands, I think I'll find some colonised people who actually have stuff I want and buy that instead. Good thing my country colonised 1/3 of the world to make it easy for me!
I do wish Black Hammer the best of luck, I find their project fascinating in the same way that a burning fireworks warehouse is fascinating - I want to watch it explode, but from a very safe distance.
I honestly don't know and they could be 100% serious, but the houses that seem very specifically designed to look like African mud huts makes it seem more like parody to me.
Unless that's how "decolonized architecture" is supposed to look like, because you can't decolonize and still live in the architecture designed by the society steeped in racist oppression, can you? I think by now we're so deep into Poe's law territory that it's impossible to distinguish a parody from a genuine attempt to outwoke everybody.
I think it was well over a year before I was clear if "woke" was descriptive, normative or an insult. I really sounded like the latter. A couple of months for r/donald, but that might have been intentional in the beginning. And hesitated for years to use "jew" (non native english speaker).
At first it was used in earnest, but then eagerly appropriated by those critical of social justice, because previously there wasn't a useful condescending insult for it (SJW is obviously pretty weak).
Not sure how well Coloradan and Sahelian climates compare but it might also be wise to look at the vernacular architecture of the pre-columbian peoples of that area. The Navajo built hogans, using large amounts of packed mud to provide thermal mass.
Proven to "work" in supporting a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle I suppose. Whether or not this is what the people signing up for this community want/expect doesn't seem entirely clear...
I applaud anyone willing to live in a teepee or skin lean-to during a Dakotan or Montana winter. I will tip my hat to their frozen dessicated wolf-gnawed corpse in the spring, that is.
It's a big state. The climate in Aspen and the climate in Cortez don't have a lot in common. I'd love to know where, exactly, the Hammer plan to settle in Colorado.
I figured the mud huts were one of those 3D-printed type buildings. It makes sense that a small communist community would communally own 1 house printer and give everyone an identical hut.
Black hammer has begun the project of healing the divide, by so fucking ridiculous any political alignment can get in some sick burns on twitter (accept for libs, but when's the last time anyone saw a lib in the wild? Their only remaining habitat is about 98% of the government)
Unpopular opinion, but I think the much more successful route for a charter city to go through would just be to copy the commercial codes of an already existing, successful 1st world country. Versus whatever Prospera is trying to do, which seems to be creating a new political system & commercial contract code that has never been tried before- plus lots of blockchain language, of course. Without commenting on the specifics of Prospera's proposed system- basic intellectual humility tells us that a new, untried system of governance & commercial regulation will probably encounter some unforeseen issues and hiccups.
On the other hand a charter city could just, like, use the UCC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code 'The Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), first published in 1952, is one of a number of Uniform Acts that have been established as law with the goal of harmonizing the laws of sales and other commercial transactions across the United States' The UCC currently runs a $22 trillion economy and has for decades- Prospera's proposed system has never, uh, run anything ever. Which sounds like a better option?
Residents could use binding arbitration to resolve disputes under the UCC- tons of US law firms offer it now, and I bet a few would even offer lower rates for a charter city in dirt-poor Honduras trying to get off the ground. (Lots of law firms do pro bono or charity work). Fast, efficient, and certainly better than using local judges.
I suspect there is tension between idealistic charter city libertarians, who may be a bit touch impractical, versus what might actually be the best system for Honduras, Ecuador, Haiti, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, the Philippines, etc. This plus switching to using the US dollar versus the totally unstable local currency (Ecuador, Panama and Somalia already do this as an official policy) seems much more practical. Also seems like it would advance US interests & influence, particularly in getting more & more small countries to use the dollar as their official currency
This reminds me of one of my all-time favorite entries from the old blogosphere. It is written very literally and directly about lessons in the software industry, but I think many of the learnings and ideas apply metaphorically to all kinds of domains, including the situation you're talking about here.
I wonder if the UCC was the (or one of the) inspirations for the Common Economic Protocol in "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson. (That book is _eminently_ relevant to this post in lots of other ways too.)
Big plus on getting burned when trying something completely new. Also, having rules but not institutions and traditions is a bit like having genetic code without culture. You'll end up with feral humans :D
I've watched from inside a political party that started with good ideals and good people, got leaderless in the first 6 months, and tried to apply the rules written in peacetime by idealistic people in a situation of conflict. Yeah, details like "in which order will complaints be solved" turned to be decisive. You can suspend your rivals the week before a vote, and bury indefinitely complaints against your side. And that's just one mild example of creative rule applying.
Good rules without instututions/traditions are worth exactly nothing. And leaders are damn useful because they can get consensus for whatever they're doing, whether it's in the book or not.
Even if they do want the weird multilocal commercial code, there's nothing stopping them from starting off with the UCC and then adding more legal systems one at a time.
Ulex, the open source legal system, used by Prospera and developed by Tom Bell, is based on UCC,
"Ulex’s rules have moreover been tested long and hard in the real world; because it borrows from the (private, non-profit) Uniform Law Commission’s Uniform Commercial Code, which more than 50 jurisdictions have also adopted in whole or part, Ulex gets the benefit of popular and trusted rule-sets.”"
If I were going to make a libertarian enclave in the US I'd obviously go to Puerto Rico. Yes, New Hampshire has 1.4 million people and PR has 3.2 million. But in both cases 10k is not really enough to make a difference. Puerto Rico needs people to stimulate the economy much more, which a bunch of wacky ancaps might be able to. Plus Puerto Rico's got extremely generous tax incentives to move. You can basically get out of all your US taxes by moving to Puerto Rico. This is because Puerto Rico isn't a state so it has less direct Federal rule. If you got control of Puerto Rico you'd have a semi-sovereign state where even Federal rules on expatriots don't apply.
If I were going to make a libertarian country I'd choose the Bahamas. It has a smaller population (less than 400k), outsources its defense to the US/UK, good internet access, and funds itself mostly through sales taxes. It's also relatively wealthy, has good infrastructure, and used to be a bunch of pirates. Only downside is that you have to be a resident there for ten years before you can vote. But what are you going to vote for anyway? It already has no income taxes. If that's a real bar, there's Antigua and Barbuda (population 100k). It has high corporate and sales taxes and is more distant and less built up. But it's also already a small government with no personal income tax, including on foreign investment. You can buy citizenship much cheaper than Montenegro. So there's two countries that already have pretty libertarian-ish policies and are small enough that 10k people moving there would make a real difference. They're also famously beautiful places.
Of course, I'm still broadly of the opinion that Special Economic Zones work when they are large areas of land, there's large pre-existing inefficiencies, there's significant regulatory and judicial concessions, and the someone dumps in a lot of money.
Montenegro because it is geographically in Europe and is set to join the Union soon, it being the target of Free Society Project Europe. Though this further points to Europe not being the place for any libertarian hubs.
FSP already claims to have made a difference, and if we cherry-pick carefully, maybe so. The proportion of FSP members in the legislature as compared to their share of the population of the state is quite lopsided.
Might there be a reason (beyound systemic oppression) why Libertarians are always "losing at everything" ? Mixed economies dominate the developed world, after all.
Their ride-alongs are a real problem, optically. You start a political movement that is all about freedom, and a couple decades latter people only know you as "Republicans but weed".
I pre-emptively apologize for the snark, but still: from where I'm standing, Libertarian Socialism is one of the few political philosophies that is actually doing *worse* than vanilla Libertarianism. Thus, perhaps, the riders aren't exactly the problem. Especially since ye olde dictatorial Socialism is enjoying a bit of a resurgence right now (in a limited fashion).
I think their problem is most of the sensible, appealing object-level things they stand for are mostly already being done (or at least spoken about) by neoliberals and centrists in office, and most of the other stuff they talk about is off-putting or unappealing at an object level to most people.
Note that this was not the case 30-40 years ago, and that change is an argument against the "always losing at everything" premise. I am not that old, but I am plenty old enough to remember when same sex marriage equality, drug legalization, and sex work legalization were fringe positions and most non-libertarians thought that only those crazy radicals would actually believe in such things.
I understand that marriage equality and drug legalization are consistent with Libertarian ideas; but is there any evidence to suggest that Libertarians have made any significant contributions to the change in these policies ?
Well, they were part of the LP platform when Ed Clark ran in 1980 IIRC, when very few non-libertarians were advocating them, and that may have played some part in getting them into the Overton window. Much of the rest of whatever influence there was probably happened via libertarian participation in coalitional, non-libertarian-branded organizations like the ACLU and NORML.
The author of Coyote Blog was a big part of the state-level push to pass marraige equity laws. Until it became popular, and all the right thinking progressives discovered he was a yucky libertarian and kicked him out of the possition, apparently without consulting the dictionary definition of irony.
IIRC, they didn't so much have a problem with his libertarian self, but with the fact that he was persuading (some) conservative Republicans to get on board with gay marriage and the progressives wanted to preserve that as a "this is why conservative Republicans are Pure Evil" wedge issue.
But that's based entirely on Coyote's reporting; I'd really like to see what the other side had to say about it at the time.
For sure. Similar process to the 'what happened to internet atheists' entry, basically evaporative cooling - they won, most moved on to other thing, those who didn't are different than those who were there originally.
It's really hard to get political support when you want to take away all the opportunities for graft. Also, it turns out that people really like Bread And Circuses.
1. In freeish democracies, few voters really want freedom; they are more interested in using their votes to tell other people what to do.
2. Libertarians themselves are an independent-minded, contentious lot, who often have difficulty playing well with others. Just look at the state of the US Libertarian Party this month.
If you can just get everything you want by coercion, why bother with exchange? Maybe the thought you were trying to express makes sense, but the way you expressed it doesn’t. Maybe you just want to say a cap will never happen because most people don’t want to try it?
Are libertarians just utilitarians who happen to think that freedom has utilitarian benefits to other ultimate ends, and would abandon freedom in a heartbeat if they saw good evidence to the contrary?
Personally I think that for 'libertarian' to be a meaningful and interesting label, it must refer to people who place some amount of value on freedom/liberty as an end in and of itself, rather than a means to an end.
"1. In freeish democracies, few voters really want freedom; they are more interested in using their votes to tell other people what to do."
You make this sounds like a bad thing. The unspoken implication here is that people just want to be busybodies, telling their neighbors what color to paint their house or preventing others from smoking weed. But telling other people what to do also subsumes telling them not steal, dump toxins into the water, or make employees work 100 hour weeks else they get fired. So this statement "using their votes to tell other people what to do" tries to use a very broad brush to paint a picture with a specific mood. I think we should be more precise in our generalizations.
You have a point, but you overstate it. The distinction he was making is unclear in his statement, but it exists. No one wants to be murdered, so a rule against murder is pretty much unanimous. Rules about paint colors are zero sum games between groups with different taste.
Rules about paint colors make that cities remain looking somewhat harmoniously. On such issues, I'd rather have me losing, than no one winning at all.
This is one of my main problems with libertarianism - it assumes that preferences are fixed and invididual ("I want a green house") instead of contingent and social ("I want all houses in my street to look harmoniously together").
This is also, imo, why the ideology attracts so much people on the spectrum and a kind of "rugged einzelgänger", because these people actually tend to have very specific and fixed preferences.
>Rules about paint colors make that cities remain looking somewhat harmoniously.
No doubt.
>On such issues, I'd rather have me losing, than no one winning at all.
That is nice rhetoric but not really much of an argument. If that is actually the choice you face, you can either persuade other persons to agree with you or try to force them to obey. If you are calling for force, what is your justification?
>libertarianism - it assumes that preferences are fixed
How did you get that impression? I would have said it was the reverse. I am interested to hear why you think so.
>and invididual ("I want a green house") instead of contingent and social ("I want all houses in my street to look harmoniously together").
Are you saying there are no voluntary means for pursuing the end of “I want all houses in my street to look harmoniously together"? Is compulsion more social than consensus?
>This is also, imo, why the ideology attracts so much people on the spectrum
Pop psychology has little to do with what is true, possible, or right. We could apply the similar logic to all ideologies. If so, what shall we conclude?
I appreciate serious criticism and invite you to expand on your reaction.
My foremost reservation about libertarianism has to do with dealing with risk. Nozick based his justification of the minimal state on the risk created by persons who opted out of the dominant protection scheme. If their rights can be violated just because others fear them, without them actually causing harm or dispute, this seems to open to door for many rights violations. Rothbard mapped out the opposite extreme, advocating that only actual harm was relevant, not risk. But interpreted uncharitably, that would mean that attempted murder is not a crime, so long as it fails without actually injuring anyone. This does not seem acceptable either.
My gloss of Nozick may be uncharitable. I think he called for full compensation for the dissidents, which at least places some sort of limit on things. But if compensation was really full, a deal could be arranged voluntarily, rather than being imposed involuntarily. But the bargaining provides a difficulty. Nozick simply declares that providing free protection services to the dissidents should suffice. But this gives all the paying citizens/customers an incentive to opt out.
Anyhow, I think libertarians need a principle that tells us when putting someone else at risk counts as a violation of their rights and when it doesn’t. I am not aware of anyone having addressed this issue adequately, including conservatives, liberals, fascists, communists, progressives or social democrats. It seems to be handled ad hoc.
I think a lot of this is that if you believe governments are dysfunctional and free markets are the best place to be, spending decades in politics is going to seem drastically unattractive. So the people with truly libertarian mindsets end up building giant business empires and then attracting conspiracy theories by funding right wing thinktanks (see: Koch Brothers), meaning those who are left in the quasi-public sector advocating for libertarian politics tend to be not that high achieving.
In contrast, the political left sends its "best" people into battle because they intuit that the public sector is really, really great and only governments can solve the really big and important problems.
To be noted: a giant business empire is one of the least libertarian communities one can imagine. It's got an almost military level of heirarchy and organization, and your freedom to disagree with the dominant paradigms is approximately zip. So if you're a captain of industry and call yourself a libertarian, you almost certainly mean "when you're not at your job in my company."
My cynical take: winning democratic elections involves, at least in part, handing out goodies to reward loyal constituencies or to win over new ones. A political philosophy that says goodies are theft and promises to get rid of them is not going to prove a successful strategy.
Another big facet of democratic politics is building durable coalitions out of disparate groups. For people who make individualism their sine qua non, they tend to be somewhat disagreeable by nature, and thus don't readily form stable groups to begin with, and to the extent they do, they're terrible at turning groups into coalitions.
LIbertarians are an excellent goad and loyal opposition, but they suck at actual governance. They can't even rule *themselves* and they have no good ideas about how to rule others*. So, yes, they will always lose elections so long as voters have any sense at all -- but *in the process of losing* they may very well have significant and important influence.
-------------
* To be fair, it's hard to expect more from a philosophy that at line 1 rather eschews the entire concept of one man telling another what to do for arbitrary or purely practical reasons -- which is almost a definition of "government."
Do you mean in the sense that few officeholders have a big L next to their name or the sense that policy isn't moving in a libertarian direction?
These two metrics for winning are not the same and can sometimes be in opposition (e.g. when UKIP got what they wanted, rendering themselves irrelevant as a protest party)
The circle encompassing "Don't tread on me, I should be free to smoke, shoot guns, employ 8 year olds, and drive without a seatbelt" people and the circle encompassing "Willing to learn Serbo Croatian and live with mandated government health insurance" peopl don't seem like they'd have much overlap.
I'm very conflicted about what my takeaway from this blog should be. Scott is a Libertarian, and I (like many other readers) am sympathetic to Libertarianism. However, at the same time, he writes about Moloch, which can only really be solved by a benevolent dictatorship or some other form of government that solves the biggest coordination problem known to humanity. He talks about the state guiding charter cities in order to really upliftment millions out of poverty.
So every individual should be completely free both socially and economically, but there should be someone at the meta level who is coordinating all our actions?
I’d say that libertarianism and state-driven coordination are compatible. There is that whole branch of “state capacity libertarianism”, after all.
If you see molochian coordination problems as sapping people’s freedom just as government regulations can, then the government can have a role in enabling freedom, not just restricting it.
Or, to put it in a more snappy phrasing: many (most?) libertarians are not anarchists.
Almost no libertarians are anarchists. At least, I've been "libertarian" my entire adult life (participated in the 1980 election campaign), and I've never met a libertarian who advocated no government. Rather, I see libertarianism as more of a political or social *tendency*, centered on Thoreau's dictum that government is best which governs least.
This idea that libertarians advocate anarchy and zero government is a strawman regularly trotted out by members of all other traditional political persuasions.
Is Scott even libertarian in some well-defined sense or in common usage sense? Isn't there some contradiction between voting for Warren in the primaries and colloquial usage of "libertarian" in the US? (honest question, as I don't understand US politics very well; also, did he change his mind about everything in https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertarian-faq/?)
My main take away from reading this blog is that the space of ideas and the space of possibilities are vastly greater than the tiny slice that we let ourselves explore, and we should let people explore more of them (e.g. because solutions to our problems are hidden there). To me this seems like the main overlap between libertarianism and Scott's views (see e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/).
In US politics we often use the phrase "X-leaning" to describe someone who is largely sympathetic towards a minority viewpoint, but inevitably tends to vote for major party candidates on something approaching the "lesser evil" logic.
So Scott would be a "libertarian-leaning" progressive, meaning he is much more sympathetic towards libertarian views than the average progressive. Similarly, I would be a "libertarian-leaning" conservative, because while I am highly sympathetic towards libertarian values, at the end of the day, I decided my vote was better applied to Trump than to Jo Jorgensen.
(I'm hoping this counts as a non-CW answer to a question that was inherently about politics)
I think Scott understands that there is absolutely no reason to believe that there exists some simple, uniform solution to all our problems, and if there does exist such a thing, it isn't well-described by any existing label.
Thanks for the link! I have avoided reading the Anti-Libertarian FAQ in the past because of its length (and my minimal understanding of economics), but I read the whole thing this afternoon. Although my recent reading my ACX somewhat convinces me that Scott has gradually become more Libertarian than this FAQ (written in 2014) would suggest, it puts this article along with "How Asia Works" and "Meditations on Moloch" into a largely self-consistent framework.
I think Akoncity, a planned 200 acre, 6 billion dollar enterprise by rapper Akon deserves mention, if only for the over the top bio-punk aesthetic: https://akoncity.com/
Unfortunately, all the available information appears to be written in futuristic real estate word saladese:
"AKONCITY.. it is Senegal rivalry futuristic development to become the beacon of innovation and human development by providing the best education solution, to lead the economy of the country creating the most revolutionary industry, rewarding Senegalese hard work for making Senegal the leading country in technology innovation and natural resources best used by providing the best housing with at most futuristic design comforting the daily life with mixed use of entertainment and services for all types of residential buildings (social, middle class and high end)."
I was going to nominate Akoncity for the next round of these. I heard ages ago that Akon was using his money to build a city in Senegal, but it sounded like just one of many tech incubators in developing countries. Then I checked back a few years later and it’s this insane marketing firm extravaganza of vaguely defined spaces in buildings that all resemble designer sex toys.
Let's say one hypothetically wished to found a separatist city-state and managed to achieve a large-enough group of people willing to follow you to this new attempt at utopia. What systems do you put in place to guarantee the best possible result?
For instance, one could implement systems to cull some of those wishing to join. "No violent felonies" is always a good place to start, and I imagine a number of people in the rationalist community would elect to implement a minimum IQ or a minimum net worth. Others might want to survey for compatible values, or require a donation to fund the city-state and perhaps be a measure of commitment to its well-being.
What ideologies, values, and systems would separate your city-state from others? Other than state-subsidized Modafinil, that is.
One big thing will be to ensure a good age/gender balance. A lot of these projects seem to attract young men, and few people want to live in a town that is 90% single guys. You need women, families, children, and elderly in any society.
"require a donation" sounds a lot like taxation, and, in fact, that is the only taxation I'd like for my community: a flat yearly fee for every resident. This would incentivize high-income people to move in and it would keep the riff-raff out. It would also eliminate all the costs and market distortions caused by other systems of taxation. Plus, it's the only reasonably fair system of taxation – everyone pays the same fee and everyone is entitled to the same services.
If this succeeds who would pay disability allowance or pensions for people who didn't manage to save up? These people sound like riff raff that won't be let the new shiny society and yet that's where all the tax base will be
The bear problem was, as I recall, came about only because it is illegal to shoot them. If you could shoot them there’d be no problem at all, but the federal government intervened and overruled them.
You've read Nixonland already but Black Hammer really reminds me of the black kids who would go to MLK events to boo him for being a weak moderate and then demand money from naive white people for 'our brothers in prison' (page 211)
These things can also happen spontaneously. An example, from close to where I grew up, is Åland Islands. It is Swedish speaking, but goes under Finnish law (with a substantial amount of autonomy from mainland Finland), so when Sweden outlawed homeschooling, they started attracting new citizens. I think the numbers of families homeschooling is at 5 percent now, and it has been doubling every year for 5+ years, so this group (consisting to a large degree of an unholy alliance of hippies and libertarians) could conceivably become a major political force in the Island Government in a few years. That could lead to a lot of new possibilities for developing better modes of education.
(We see a similar trend at the island where I live, Bornholm, where German families tend to escape if they want to homeschool.)
And I assume there are other, similar developments, in other areas, caused by differences in legal codes.
No idea. It might turn shapeless and fizzle out if there isn't someone that can channel the network power and give it direction. Don't know the history of interest groups congregating for random reasons.
Note that the Åland islands have very severe restrictions on who gets to but property on the islands in order to maintain its cultural distinction from mainland Finland so it would be hard to pull off a Free State Project there. You need some kind of family connection to move there as far as I remember (it's been a while since I looked into it) so don't expect any great inflow of libertarian-minded Finns or Swedes who could tip the scales closer to a Nordic An-capistan anytime soon
Yeah, that's a bit of hassle. You need to rent for five years before you can buy a property on the main island. On many of the smaller islands there are no such rules.
No, it is an asshole idea. Its basically a hostile takeover or an invasion. The plan is take over a place and then enforce your politics on other people. That is just one or two steps of evil away from invading a foreign country and stealing the natives land.
Food for thought: is the Free State Project more comparable to point A below, or to point B?
A. Gentrification. A mostly-poor community sees an influx of well-off outsiders who buy property, move in, and supplant the old social/political/business networks with new ones. They change the nature of the social community, and bring in new, higher-cost-to-consumer businesses that displace the businesses which used to be touchstones of the community.
B. Immigration. A large number of people who are not burn into the local culture, and have limited understanding of local politics, move into the area. They may bring new workers (which affects the base rate of wages), may not be cognizant of local law and custom, and may introduce social trouble due to that lack of awareness.
Neither of these has to rise to the level of hostile takeover before they generate lots of political and social stress.
In the United States, these two things are considered troubling by opposite ends of the political spectrum, for reasons which appear not to be fully thought-out.
In my mind, both patterns of behavior are similar, and both can be described as a prelude to hostile takeover. Even if the hostile takeover wasn't the intent of the people involved.
It's worth keeping in mind that *part* of the reason NH was selected as the state for the FSP (who came up with the concept prior to selecting an actual location) was because it was already fairly libertarian-leaning. We are talking about the state whose motto is "Live Free or Die," you know?
So even if you think of it as a hostile takeover, it's not *that* hostile. It's not like they are moving to a far left state and trying to turn it far right. They're moving to one of the most libertarian states in the union and trying to make it even more libertarian. If you're someone who hates libertarianism and thinks it's a stupid and failed philosophy - why exactly are you living in New Hampshire in the first place?
(A) The benefits of gentrification (if any) should be carefully weighted against the massive damages they cause. The affected community should have at least some veto power.
I also have *some* sympathies for NIMBYs.
(B) I hold the opinion that immigrants have an ethical obligation to assimilate into the host culture. Moreover, I think it is ethically wrong to emigrate to a country whose culture you don't like.
I'm curious as to how you give the affected community veto power without stepping on property rights. If I own real estate in a poor community, and I decide to sell to some rich big-shot, what standing does anyone have to tell me I can't? Can laws be passed to limit real estate price, or what it can be sold for? Do such laws already exist?
Oh, I wouldn't mind stepping on property rights, at least a little bit.
But I was rather thinking of something like requiring community approval for new buildings.
And if zoning laws can keep poor people out, they can also be adjusted to keep poor people in. Vienna is doing this : iirc they requiere new buildings to have something like 30% low-cost appartments.
The Osha cult did this in Oregon back in the 80's. Basically took over a whole town and then got laws and policies changed to benefit the cult (as profiled on the Neflix doc "Wild Wild Country.") I can understand why the "natives" were upset.
The Mormons were doing it in the 1830s. This is why people kept killing them until they finally fled to Utah. People need to remember there's a certain social compact behind democracy, and if you egregiously violate that compact while abiding by the letter of the law, you can't always expect everyone else to uphold the letter of the law. Sometimes, it turns out, they'll shoot you in the face and then declare the killers innocent at trial.
I've read of right-wing blogs (and with links to mainstream news stories to back them up) about Somali immigrants taking over various counties in Minnesota and Michigan.
Well, except the "one or two steps" might involve "having superior ethics." If all the angels move to Hell and vote out Satan, that would be a good thing, notwithstanding Satan and his archfiends are deprived of their property (the souls of men).
Your argument is based on an unexamined assumption that all politics are morally equivalent. Generally, we acknowledge that they are not. What makes you assume they are in this case?
Do the original residents agree about invaders' superior ethics? As resident in another small European country, I certainly do not like idea that organized action by foreigners to move in and improve the ethical norms of how our state functions. It sounds suspiciously like the justification presented by both Lenin and Stalin.
Peace of Westphalia established a precedent against correcting, in favor of each state possessing a right to determine what is thought as the normative ethics in that sate as far as the state is concerned. If your ethical principles dictate that Montenegro is Hell, their current rulers are as morally corrupt as Lucifer himself, and you have a right -- no, a duty to start a crusade to bring the joys of Liberty there, I have not much realistic chances of convincing you otherwise, but nobody has any duty to accept your framing.
In general, it is considered a good thing to let other nations to live their lives as they see fit in country that has been recognized by other nation-states as belonging to them. I would prefer your superior ethics would spread by convincing arguments instead of coming here and pushing me around.
(1) I operate from the model that the effects of enforcing a policy on a native population have two components :
(a) The quality of the policy
(b) a massive negative effect from the enforcement
You would have to be pretty confident that your policy is really much better, to compensate for (b).
(2) Given the fact that most political ideologies consider themselves morally superior, the idea that it is a good thing to invade some place and enforce your superior morals on them is quite dangerous. More generally, "It's not evil if *we* do it" is a meme that I would love to see exterminated.
(3) Given the facts that - (a) libertarianism is a fringe believe in the US, and (b) it is even around these parts only a minority view, and (c) if you zoom out to look at the entire world it starts looking pretty much like a weird culture-specific quirk of the US - I think you cannot justify the high level of confidence that you would need to justify its imposition on unwilling natives.
This is not about taking over, but about supporting and strengthening local libertarian tendencies, working exclusively through them. The status of non-citizens guarantees this legally - unlike in-country movement, any coercion is impossible here, these are not Cortez's troops.
Let's lay out *all* the ups and downs, shall we? You're a minority who finds the policies imposed on you by the majority (in essentially all places) intolerable. Here are all the options I can think of:
1) Live in misery forever.
2) Revolt and get massacred.
3) Emigrate to terra nullius.
4a) Emigrate to somewhere that isn't terra nullius; massacre the inhabitants.
4b) Emigrate to somewhere that isn't terra nullius, and in which you'll form a majority; take over the government by peaceful means.
#3 is best, but we ran out of terra nullius a long time ago (if people get enough wealth to afford subsistence on Antarctica or space stations, we could get more, but that isn't the case now). #2 and #4a are kind of terrible. And #4b dominates #1 under utilitarianism, because even if you make the prior inhabitants miserable, you outnumber them (they can also emigrate and be non-miserable).
Zionism (and let's be frank, here - this is totally what the Zionists did) *is* kind of an arsehole move, but there are definite upsides to it (also, if you close off all of someone's non-miserable non-violent options, you're counting on their better nature to prevent them becoming a terrorist).
On the project in Montenegro, 95% of our main activity is in the telegram, we have not yet found a better platform and are concentrated there. At the same time, basically everything is in Russian - https://t.me/Seasteading_EastEurope
It occurs to me that the Great Pandemic of 2020 may have given all of these projects a boost, if they can move fast enough to take advantage of it. One of the problems with e.g. the Free State Project is that the sort of libertarians who are most likely to make it viable (or the sort of POC most likely to make Hammer City viable, etc), are the ones most likely to already have established careers and social networks that would not survive moving to Random Isolated Low-Population Enclave. And the ones most likely to make the move will be the ones with the least to lose. Which will include some contingently-capable people who can flourish but only in a community tailored to their needs, but even more of the generally-incapable losers in the movement.
I think a lot of people are greatly overestimating the extent to which "work from home and socialize on Zoom!" is going to be the Wave of the Future, but it's a lot more thinkable and at least somewhat more practical than it was two years ago. I don't think it will be a huge effect, but I could be wrong. Has anyone looked to see if there's been an uptick in e.g. the number of libertarians moving to Grafton, or to NH generally, over the past year?
Not only that, but the pandemic also seems to have proven that federalism isn't quite as dead as we thought, and that having a solid governor and/or legislature can actually matter *a whole freaking lot* to one's quality of life, even if the Feds are a bunch of incompetent tyrants.
"Who cares if you take over a state? Washington DC will just wreck everything" seems like less convincing of an objection today than it would have two years ago. Thanks, Ron DeSantis!
It would be great to see all the people who think everyone can work from home move somewhere together. I mean, after a year or so, when it dawns on them that someone has to actually fix the sewers, manufacture and install toilets, grade roads, plant and harvest crops, bake bread and deliver it, wire up telephone lines, et cetera, and none of this -- in fact, none of the overwhelming bulk of what makes a functioning modern society function -- can be done by uploading updated code to Github.
Being of a naturally suspicious and crabbed nature, I think the solution there would be "As for living, our servants will do that for us". Which is to say, the idea would be to hire on the native (Hondurans or whomever) who live outside the new charter city to do all the scut work of street sweeping, wiring up lines, working on the roads, etc.
So you'd get the Charter City Citizens who are all telecommuting and earning huge (by local standards) salaries, and the local people who are the cheap labour and just take the bus to work in the morning and back home in the evening out of the City. The benevolent paternalism there would be "we're giving employment and helping the local economy to improve", the less nice view of it would be "Saudi-type 'migrant workers'" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_workers_in_Saudi_Arabia#Abuse_and_scandals
Hopefully France will keep vetoing the access of new countries in the eu. Nothing personal and I am really sorry for the people of the Western balkans but our union is already disfunctional enough with 27 states with veto power over everything that matters.
Charter cities are very interesting as an idea, but I remain skeptical until we see a major success. Running a city is difficult and expensive, and the ideological bent of many charter founders leads me to suspect that they may be more in it for ideology than execution. Whether you're libertarian or anarchist or communist, SOMEONE has to do the hard/frustrating/expensive work of executing the many complex things that allow a city to function.
It's also important to note that most cities rely on funding from state and federal sources for significant portions of their budgets. This may not be essential to a successful city, but it certainly disadvantages charter cities which may not have access to such funding.
I'd be much more persuaded by an execution-oriented charter - a charter formed by people who are very passionate about making a great city per se - than by these ideological charters.
Prospera's advisory board includes Oliver Porter, who developed the "outsourced government" model of Sandy Springs, GA; Jeffrey Singer, former CEO of the Dubai International Financial Centre; Shanker Singham, a leading expert in international trade law and more. These are people with exceptional experience in real world projects. Sandy Springs and the DIFC work well. Media tends to emphasize an ideological angle, but the reality on the ground is much more execution oriented. Oliver Porter may know more about writing public/private contracts so as to align incentives than anyone alive. He can certainly get into the weeds on this kind of an issue with anyone.
I note, however, that Sandy Springs is moving away from the outsourced government/PPP model:
"In 2019, the Sandy Springs City Council moved to scale back the PPP model, directly hiring 183 contract employees, leaving only 15 outsourced full-time workers by the end of 2019. The city will still outsource a number of services, including the city attorney's office, as well as security, street sweeping and ambulance services. The move is expected to save $2.7 million in the next year and more than $14 million over 5 years."
I thought that cities were almost all net contributors to the hinterlands. IE, the city residents pay out much more in state and federal taxes than they take back in in state and federal benefits. If that's the case, if only city taxes have to paid, they could be lower while still being adequate for the city budget.
Don't you know that oppression and privilege have nothing to do with history or economics, it's purely about your skin color? Remember, race is a social construct but oppressed/privileged status is inborn and easily determined by one's skin color, not the other way around.
But you see, this is the crux of my existential uncertainty here! I am a white person who is a citizen of a country that was colonised by a different bunch of white people. Am I an oppressor or am I privileged? Am I oppressing myself? Can I be oppressed at all, and if not, then what about The Eight Hundred Years?
Montenegro is beautiful and well worth a visit. Last time I was there, I had a Montenegrin explain to me how much better it was under Tito - at least it was predictable. I'm not sure libertarianism will rule the day there. :) I'm also not keen on ethnic/religious conflict.
If the impetus for this is coming mainly from Central and Eastern Europeans (if I'm reading this aright with the comment about their site being in Russian mostly), then okay, they can handle "centuries of division and tension along religious and ethnic lines" and worst comes to the worst, they can leg it across the Adriatic to Italy (the benefit of Montenegro).
On the other hand, if it looked like a bunch of Germans or Swiss were seriously interested in this, I'd rate its chances of success much higher.
People are selfish creatures, they will not participate in a migration project, no matter how rational in terms of logic, if it risks reducing their personal standard of living. Therefore, I very much doubt that people from developed countries will participate in the project with Montenegro. This is for us Montenegro is a combination of beneficial migration with an increase in the quality of life, as well as a political program. For people from richer countries, this is self-denial and too unlikely altruism.
It should be borne in mind that most of the participants in our project are anarcho-capitalists, and we consider the implementation of the minarchy's program to be fantastic, otherwise it was necessary to try to promote liberal reforms in their countries. And from the ankap's point of view, ethnic division is an important prerequisite for the transition to a competitive market government; Within the framework of an integral cohesive society with an ethnic monogroup majority, social contradictions are not strong enough to get away from the principle of a monopoly state. Therefore, what you consider to be a problem, in our opinion, represents a unique opportunity, since the conflict in Montenegro is still peaceful and is unlikely to reach a hot phase again.
Please don't, seriously. I think a lot of the people who find his participation amusing seriously underestimate how unpleasant other people find it. In fact, if I anticipated that he would consistently show up to participate in the comments, I would not only stop bothering to read the comments, I would very likely stop visiting Astral Codex Ten at all in order to avoid reminding myself of the frustration.
He is pretty dedicated in showing up whenever someone talks about anything minimally adjacent to communism in order to demand that people provide their explanation on how possibly they can disagree with the Only Correct Understanding of Communism (which is his)
Having engaged with him a while back against my better judgment, I've come around to very strongly suspecting that he's not merely an uncommonly persistent and obtuse person, but a deliberate troll, and I find it frustrating how many members here actively solicit his participation.
I'm pretty skeptical of organized entrism, like the Montenegro thing. Collective action is difficult and mostly attracts crazy people. I prefer the invisible-hand approach of e.g. just moving somewhere with low taxes if you like low taxes – you instantly get what you want, and, as a bonus, you push the market in the right direction.
Has the Hong Kong experience taught you nothing? Reducing taxes is a situational policy, it will not in itself lead to a transition to contract jurisdictions, it is typical of less democratic regimes that, as their wealth grows, will undergo a democratic transition and, as a result, also slide into a large government of social populists.
No, I'm afraid I can't say it has – you'd have to enlighten me. I would naïvely say that the reasonable response to the deterioration of one jurisdiction would be to switch to another one, just like with any other supplier in the marketplace.
Over the past 100 years, the share of states in the economy has grown 10 times. Your migration will not be enough to change the policy of governments, they will find someone to parasitize without you. You do not yet have a normal state of the market for public services in order to fully consider it in this capacity. This can be formulated in your market analogy - if everyone around produces bad and outdated goods, then this is an opportunity to become an entrepreneur yourself and produce something better. It is foolish to sit at the dawn of personal computers and wait for Bill Gates with Jobs, when you, possessing the insider, can become one yourself.
But these people are not trying to create a more profitable government – they are more akin to Amnesty International than to Microsoft Corp. On the other hand, there are actual governments that are trying to entice profitable subjects by offering favourable conditions – basically free money for anyone willing to make the move.
if someone else does not do something that seems reasonable and profitable to you, then this is not a problem, but an opportunity for your own entrepreneurial initiative. Just following those who situationally slightly improve the situation is far from the most proactive model. In another hundred years, with this approach, the share of the state in the average world GDP can double again.
I think the most likely outcome if I tried to create my own jurisdiction would be failure. If instead I focus on those sectors of the economy where I have a comparative advantage, and buy governance from someone who has a comparative advantage in the governance sector, I am more likely to live a prosperous life.
The Shirley Temple thing freaked me out so I didn't go to their website, but I'm not sure how profitable running an 8 week bootcamp for $200 is. I assume people will need to eat and sleep over the two months in addition to learning all the great stuff they want to teach. But they're charging about $3/day, which doesn't seem to leave a lot for profit. Or maybe it's subsidized by all the money they're making from the Hammer City development
The idea of a large number of like minded people moving to a small town to gain political control was tried in Antelope, Oregon in the 1980s. Hundreds of followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh moved to a nearby ranch, took control of the town, which had fewer than 30 residents, and re-named it "Rajneesh".
There were power struggles amongst the Rajneeshees, crimes were committed, including bio terrorist acts and attempted murder. The guru left the country, and the commune collapsed.
While I strongly sympathize with the original townspeople, the basic plan is legal. Except for the bio terrorism and murder, of course.
You know, it's fascinating that in an era of absolutely unprecedented ability to communicate and see who thinks what about this and that, it is still possible for people to fall into the delusion that they and their friends are just the tip of some giant iceberg, a Silent Majority (or at least Puissant Minority that can fend off any interference from the unenlightened). All we need to do is raise the flag, get more visible, and stop sitting around and just talking.
Maybe it's psychological denial? Nobody *really* wants to believe that the vast mass of humanity is like just exactly what you suspect it's like from Facebook, Twitter, and CNN.
*I* don't believe the vast mass of humanity is like what you'd think from Facebook, Twitter, and CNN. Neither talking heads on tv, nor people who yell about politics online, are representative samples of humanity. And the people each of us sees yelling about politics online aren't even representative samples of people who yell about politics online.
If anyone knows the history of Montenegro, which mostly consists of the local clans charging down out of the titular mountain and kicking the everloving shit out of whoever was stupid enough to try to take it, they would know that it's a spectacularly poor candidate for this sort of thing. I've been there, they're lovely people, but if they genuinely thought the Free Staters were a threat, I think it would end...poorly...for the libertarians.
It's great that this is their unique feature and in other countries everything is different and for the libertarian transit there are huge prerequisites of mass psychology and culture (no)
I'm not sure about Montenegro specifically, but in general I think that sort of "mountain people" are reasonably tolerant of outsiders taking over the valley towns and putting up their flags so long as they stay out of the mountains. If Montenegro is taken over by Libertarian outsiders, I suspect most of them will be content to stay in their valley towns and telecommute while leaving the mountain clans alone. Maybe, especially if there's US-libertarian participation, they'd get some of the sort who think it would be great fun to go up into the mountains and match their AR-15s against Montenegrin AK-47s. Win-win-win?
Except for small pocketknives, yes, and I think even those are discouraged. Because "knife violence" is perceived as a major social problem in the UK. British knife laws are the sort of thing that, if they didn't exist in the real world, The Onion would have made up as a parody strawman of the American gun control debate.
UK law is hilariously specific, specifically banning stuff I've never even heard of. I think you can get away with a multitool since there are non-stabbing reasons to have one, but pretty much nothing else. This is why why find the US discussion of guns so amusing over here.
I really feel like the U.S.A/China/anybody who wants the world richer should really lean into this charter city concept; they dont even have to back libertarian places, just like, not obviously bad policy charter cities.
Oh man, image of US libertarians trying to take over Montenegro made me actually laugh out loud in front of the monitor. So, for the benefit of Great Nation Of Murica and its not too East-savvy inhabitants, here's a 15 second intro:
There's a country called Turkey, which used to be Ottoman Empire for some centuries before and controlled to some extent huge area, including most of the Balkans. There were parts of Balkans they should have controlled but didn't. These were mostly Venetian, heavily fortified, backed by rich and influential republic and quite often islands/peninsulas/cut off by mountains. Also Ragusa (todays Dubrovnik), which is quite a jumble, so let's not go there, even though it's amusing jumble. And then there was Montenegro. Stuck between Venetian coastal strip on one side and Ottoman territory on all others, it managed to keep/regain some forms of autonomy or independence by consisting of mountain tribes of the most pig-headed, unrelenting, head-cutting bunch of highlanders you could find in the region that has, among others, Albanians.
They are in NATO these days and some of them are allegedly miffed about attempted Russian coup of 2016. Since this creeping takeover seems to be another attempt of spreading Russian influence through pan-Slavism, the miffed ones might not take kindly to them. Also lots of others voted in the new pro-Russian gov't recently, these might not take kindly to them as well - there's still this thing with US/NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, of which was Montenegro part. Libertarians of Ron Paul's ilk might do okay, if willing to be reduced to "voice of American freethinkers oppressed by globalizing global globalism". Even ignoring general not-taking-kindly-to-weirdo-immigrants-of-the-kind-I-dislike, there's more. You won't find libertarian leaning country in former Soviet Bloc, but I guess the ubiquitous shirking of statist requirements and lack of enforcement of laws might give you the illusion for a while. Once you really try to start and expand some enterprise or organize a political movement, it will very fast turn into Kafka or crime drama from Latin America.
As for fantasies that libertarians might be tolerated in Balkans because they are themselves tolerant, non-threatening and bringing benefits, sure. Explain this to locals. And don't forget to speak loud and clear - it's difficult to speak intelligibly when your cut off penis is stuck in your throat.
Anyway, while I've never been there myself, country is known to be beatiful, rakija strong and locals reasonably friendly, as long as you avoid some topics. Go visit once the travel gets normal, just don't buy any landmarks.
To what degree does the whole charter city concept contradict that "seeing like a state"-type notion of cities emerging organically? An efficient city that emerges organically presumably does so by selecting for skills that are relevant to making the city productive, such as attracting the best plumbers, carpenters, and hat store owners. What is neither particularly organic nor conducive to productivity is getting a bunch of people into one spot because they agree on free speech. Like at some point your city needs to actually get good at things, which would involve attracting people based on their plumbing, carpenter, and store owning credentials - but then you'll dilute the libertarian-ness of the project?
Besides, charter cities are supposed to be long-term projects, right? So how do they solve the institutional Succession Problem? For mean-reversion reasons these libertarians will probably have kids who don't really care about libertarianism. So how do they ensure the city remains libertarian?
A couple of months back when they were trending on twitter there were a lot of people casting doubts over whether they were a real organization. Based on use of stock photos and website domains not lining up. In the sense that they thought it was some elaborate troll, rather than a sincere scam. Though the difference may be mainly academic
Fun San Miguel County, Colorado fact: in 2000, it was Ralph Nader's single strongest county in the entire United States (with 17% of the vote). It is a very woke-left place, exactly the sort of place that might have tolerated an organization like this, so them getting unceremoniously kicked out from *there* really doesn't bode well for them.
They did use the term "liberated" to describe the acquisition of the land, so maybe they weren't trying to imply it was purchased?
You mean the KKKounty Sheriff?
Do you think Vesna Bratić will be happy about the "Free Society Project Europe" ?
I remember hearing about the Free State Project about 15 years ago. I may have vaguely heard the same vague suggestion mentioned here, that several thousand people moved, and some of them even got elected to the gigantic state legislature, but I'd be interested in knowing anything more about how much success they've had at any of their goals. Is there a good place to learn more about this, or should I just read the book about the bear?
There's all sorts of discussions people have about how a bunch of politically motivated people could move to a low population area with overly powerful democratic representation due to something like the electoral college (or New Hampshire's absurdly large legislature) and then use their numbers to somehow Fix Politics. It's seemed to me that the Free State Project is basically the best possible case for this - Libertarians are an unusually privileged political minority, with an unusual commitment to geographic movement for their views, and New Hampshire is a place that is already distinctly appealing to them ideologically, as well as being in congenial commuting distance of a major city. So if Libertarians can't even get control of New Hampshire this way, then there's no hope of Alabama becoming a "Black Quebec" (https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/charles-blows-dream-of-a-black-quebec) or of Democrats moving en masse to Wyoming to get two more Senators. Maybe Georgia could become a "Black Quebec", because Atlanta is already the "Black New York", and Georgia is getting to a partisan tipping point already due to underlying economic effects.
While the libertarians haven't taken over New Hampshire, they have quite a lot of small wins racked up over the years. If you go to https://www.fsp.org/nh/ and scroll down to "Legislative --- Advances for Liberty" you'll see a list.
Big changes tend to run into gubernatorial vetoes, but you can kind of work around that by putting the bill in front of the next governor, over and over again. Constitutional Carry happened that way, pot legalization is probably going to happen the next time a Democrat holds the office.
Would it be fair to characterize the New Hampshire libertarians as being behind the curve? I don't know if those two examples are illustrative, but lots of other states got them first.
It could be either way. At least we know it's the case that many of these same restrictions were also in place in those other states during the lifetime of the free state project (2001 - present).
I'm not a gun person or a marijuana person, so I may be getting all of this very wrong, but for instance, in the late 2000s, while there were many "shall issue" right-to-carry states, there were almost no "unrestricted" right-to-carry states, and now there are many. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_carry#/media/File:Right_to_Carry,_timeline.gif
And in the late 2000s, 15 states (and DC) had approved medical marijuana and none had approved full legal sale. https://www.ncsl.org/portals/1/ImageLibrary/Magazine/Deep_Dives/Marijuana_Timeline_090319.jpg
Edit: got them earlier.
I've looked over the list of "Advances for Liberty", and it looks quite lackluster. Their keynote achievement is a slight re-structuring of the mechanism by which public money -- you know, the one that comes from taxation -- can be used for education. Their loose restrictions on guns and knives sound impressive, but AFAIK are on par with many other, non-libertarian states. They claim credit for decriminalization of marijuana, which is a real achievement, but it's hard to tell whether they can take any credit for it; certainly, other states beat New Hampshire to it.
Because other states got to the same places by other means, which means there may be little or no advantage to their means (and therefore their project).
Edit: What Matthew Carlin said.
The vast majority of those states that already had loose gun and knife restrictions were not in the northeast. And other states in the area are trending in the other direction with guns (knife rights have finally made some advances in NYC).
I dunno. Vermont was the first (and for many years the only) state in the Union with Constitutional Carry).
Majority, he said.
Also, I hear Vermont, despite its long history of gun friendliness, currently has leadership trying to inch the other direction. Although the population's tendencies remain an obstacle.
Meanwhile, non-libertarian Massachusetts has had full marijuana legalization for about 3 years now.
New Hampshire just got educational savings accounts. Any family that doesn't send a kid to public school gets the amount of money the state would spend on him (not including the local money), four thousand some dollars a year, to spend on any educational resource — books, tuition, costs of home schooling. The only restriction seems to be an approved provider, but I was told that if you want your neighbor's math major kid to tutor your kid in algebra, you just call up the relevant person and she approves him.
I spent most of a week recently at Porcfest, the Free State Project's big summer event — about two thousand people, many camping, some, including me, staying in nearby motels. It was a lot fun. Largely a young crowd, lots of kids and dogs, very friendly. I suspect that part of what makes FSP work is that if you are a libertarian and move to New Hampshire you have a preexisting social network of people with something in common with you, people to help unload your moving van, answer your questions, point you at a home schooling group, ... Very good feel to it.
That using tax money for private education seems like the biggest and most distinctive achievement.
I'm still skeptical about whether, even with the social network, enough people will be incentivized to move there to actually have measurable effects on politics. My general methodological thought is that when underlying conditions are attractive to people of a particular political bent, that can make meaningful changes in the political conditions, but a group actively deciding to do it is unlikely to make any noticeable difference on top of that.
My impression was that they were a small part of the population but a significant part of the politically active population.
"But could a charter city be Park Chung-Hee’s Korea? Sounds like a harder problem, especially since it won’t be immediately profitable..."
Also harder because most charter cities aren't going to be dictatorships.
I guess it's a hard sell to declare that you'll be setting up a dictatorship in someone else's country, probably why an "Unfree State Project" never caught on.
Eh, you just have to find the right buyer. Call it an "East India Company."
Yet, growth mindset!
A lot of the ones with fuzzy board of directors and shareholder based constitutions seem ripe for an enterprising dictator to take over.
That's true. All you need is a group of friends/sycophants willing to amend the charter so that you can serve however many terms you like.
Maybe we should call it a Monarchy to generate more support
Scott continues to demonstrate his blatant anti-Marx bias through his endorsement of Black Hammer!
(KKKlown Marx is actually pretty funny just from how over the top it is, but I'm not sure what their problem with Shirley Temple is).
Anyway, I love that reparations can now be paid in instalments in exchange for merch, but since that's apparently a thing I can do to wash the blood off my hands, I think I'll find some colonised people who actually have stuff I want and buy that instead. Good thing my country colonised 1/3 of the world to make it easy for me!
I do wish Black Hammer the best of luck, I find their project fascinating in the same way that a burning fireworks warehouse is fascinating - I want to watch it explode, but from a very safe distance.
>(KKKlown Marx is actually pretty funny just from how over the top it is, but I'm not sure what their problem with Shirley Temple is).
I don't know if this is their problem with Shirley Temple, but she led a very interesting life after being a child actor, which I found out about from this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/nvx7r9/todays_google_doodle_is_triggering_epstein_brain/
I am pretty sure their project is half scam, half parody.
I honestly don't know and they could be 100% serious, but the houses that seem very specifically designed to look like African mud huts makes it seem more like parody to me.
Unless that's how "decolonized architecture" is supposed to look like, because you can't decolonize and still live in the architecture designed by the society steeped in racist oppression, can you? I think by now we're so deep into Poe's law territory that it's impossible to distinguish a parody from a genuine attempt to outwoke everybody.
TBH, I feel like a large portion of the woke movement is half scam/half parody, as well. Or maybe mostly scam with a dash of parody thrown in.
I think it was well over a year before I was clear if "woke" was descriptive, normative or an insult. I really sounded like the latter. A couple of months for r/donald, but that might have been intentional in the beginning. And hesitated for years to use "jew" (non native english speaker).
At first it was used in earnest, but then eagerly appropriated by those critical of social justice, because previously there wasn't a useful condescending insult for it (SJW is obviously pretty weak).
impossible to parody, parody becomes prediction.
I'm fairly sure you've hit it on the nail. Not living in Western architecture seems to be the point. Look up stuff like "afrofuturism".
So far as I know afrofuturism is sf written by and/or about people with relatively recent African ancestry. What do you have in mind?
Look up "afrofuturist architecture" and you'll find the exact thought process behind Hammer City's architecture.
The main problem I see is that your furniture won't fit in a round building.
IMO, they should go for a style influenced by Sudano-Sahelian architecture.
This building looks awesome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mosque_of_Djenn%C3%A9
Not sure how well Coloradan and Sahelian climates compare but it might also be wise to look at the vernacular architecture of the pre-columbian peoples of that area. The Navajo built hogans, using large amounts of packed mud to provide thermal mass.
Copying Native American architecture sounds like a good idea. Non-white, and proven to work in America's climate.
Proven to "work" in supporting a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle I suppose. Whether or not this is what the people signing up for this community want/expect doesn't seem entirely clear...
I applaud anyone willing to live in a teepee or skin lean-to during a Dakotan or Montana winter. I will tip my hat to their frozen dessicated wolf-gnawed corpse in the spring, that is.
Isn't furniture yet another item that needs to be decolonized ? Why would you put an artifact of Western oppression into your African living room ?
It's a big state. The climate in Aspen and the climate in Cortez don't have a lot in common. I'd love to know where, exactly, the Hammer plan to settle in Colorado.
I figured the mud huts were one of those 3D-printed type buildings. It makes sense that a small communist community would communally own 1 house printer and give everyone an identical hut.
Southwestern US has lots of houses that look like those.
Looks like all scam to me. Oh well, at least the victims ideologically self-select...
Black hammer has begun the project of healing the divide, by so fucking ridiculous any political alignment can get in some sick burns on twitter (accept for libs, but when's the last time anyone saw a lib in the wild? Their only remaining habitat is about 98% of the government)
Shirley Temple definitely worships satan.
"I have always found these fascinating and just remembered that nobody can prevent me from talking about them."
This was such a wonderful line! It also sums up why I love this blog. Humor, intellectual honesty and openness in exploring sometimes crazy ideas.
I almost never comment but I wanted to say I find this very interesting and hope you do more of it.
Unpopular opinion, but I think the much more successful route for a charter city to go through would just be to copy the commercial codes of an already existing, successful 1st world country. Versus whatever Prospera is trying to do, which seems to be creating a new political system & commercial contract code that has never been tried before- plus lots of blockchain language, of course. Without commenting on the specifics of Prospera's proposed system- basic intellectual humility tells us that a new, untried system of governance & commercial regulation will probably encounter some unforeseen issues and hiccups.
On the other hand a charter city could just, like, use the UCC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code 'The Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), first published in 1952, is one of a number of Uniform Acts that have been established as law with the goal of harmonizing the laws of sales and other commercial transactions across the United States' The UCC currently runs a $22 trillion economy and has for decades- Prospera's proposed system has never, uh, run anything ever. Which sounds like a better option?
Residents could use binding arbitration to resolve disputes under the UCC- tons of US law firms offer it now, and I bet a few would even offer lower rates for a charter city in dirt-poor Honduras trying to get off the ground. (Lots of law firms do pro bono or charity work). Fast, efficient, and certainly better than using local judges.
I suspect there is tension between idealistic charter city libertarians, who may be a bit touch impractical, versus what might actually be the best system for Honduras, Ecuador, Haiti, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, the Philippines, etc. This plus switching to using the US dollar versus the totally unstable local currency (Ecuador, Panama and Somalia already do this as an official policy) seems much more practical. Also seems like it would advance US interests & influence, particularly in getting more & more small countries to use the dollar as their official currency
This reminds me of one of my all-time favorite entries from the old blogosphere. It is written very literally and directly about lessons in the software industry, but I think many of the learnings and ideas apply metaphorically to all kinds of domains, including the situation you're talking about here.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/
I wonder if the UCC was the (or one of the) inspirations for the Common Economic Protocol in "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson. (That book is _eminently_ relevant to this post in lots of other ways too.)
Big plus on getting burned when trying something completely new. Also, having rules but not institutions and traditions is a bit like having genetic code without culture. You'll end up with feral humans :D
I've watched from inside a political party that started with good ideals and good people, got leaderless in the first 6 months, and tried to apply the rules written in peacetime by idealistic people in a situation of conflict. Yeah, details like "in which order will complaints be solved" turned to be decisive. You can suspend your rivals the week before a vote, and bury indefinitely complaints against your side. And that's just one mild example of creative rule applying.
Good rules without instututions/traditions are worth exactly nothing. And leaders are damn useful because they can get consensus for whatever they're doing, whether it's in the book or not.
Even if they do want the weird multilocal commercial code, there's nothing stopping them from starting off with the UCC and then adding more legal systems one at a time.
Ulex, the open source legal system, used by Prospera and developed by Tom Bell, is based on UCC,
"Ulex’s rules have moreover been tested long and hard in the real world; because it borrows from the (private, non-profit) Uniform Law Commission’s Uniform Commercial Code, which more than 50 jurisdictions have also adopted in whole or part, Ulex gets the benefit of popular and trusted rule-sets.”"
https://medium.com/chainrift-research/ulex-an-open-source-legal-system-6a05481b686f
Montenegro and New Hampshire? Weird choices.
If I were going to make a libertarian enclave in the US I'd obviously go to Puerto Rico. Yes, New Hampshire has 1.4 million people and PR has 3.2 million. But in both cases 10k is not really enough to make a difference. Puerto Rico needs people to stimulate the economy much more, which a bunch of wacky ancaps might be able to. Plus Puerto Rico's got extremely generous tax incentives to move. You can basically get out of all your US taxes by moving to Puerto Rico. This is because Puerto Rico isn't a state so it has less direct Federal rule. If you got control of Puerto Rico you'd have a semi-sovereign state where even Federal rules on expatriots don't apply.
If I were going to make a libertarian country I'd choose the Bahamas. It has a smaller population (less than 400k), outsources its defense to the US/UK, good internet access, and funds itself mostly through sales taxes. It's also relatively wealthy, has good infrastructure, and used to be a bunch of pirates. Only downside is that you have to be a resident there for ten years before you can vote. But what are you going to vote for anyway? It already has no income taxes. If that's a real bar, there's Antigua and Barbuda (population 100k). It has high corporate and sales taxes and is more distant and less built up. But it's also already a small government with no personal income tax, including on foreign investment. You can buy citizenship much cheaper than Montenegro. So there's two countries that already have pretty libertarian-ish policies and are small enough that 10k people moving there would make a real difference. They're also famously beautiful places.
Of course, I'm still broadly of the opinion that Special Economic Zones work when they are large areas of land, there's large pre-existing inefficiencies, there's significant regulatory and judicial concessions, and the someone dumps in a lot of money.
Montenegro because it is geographically in Europe and is set to join the Union soon, it being the target of Free Society Project Europe. Though this further points to Europe not being the place for any libertarian hubs.
Why not Malta then? Already party of the EU, smaller, more libertarian-ish (though very ish). Safer too.
Malta seems like it would make sense. It's also already leaning a little in that direction by being a banking and gambling haven.
AND people speak English!
FSP already claims to have made a difference, and if we cherry-pick carefully, maybe so. The proportion of FSP members in the legislature as compared to their share of the population of the state is quite lopsided.
Might there be a reason (beyound systemic oppression) why Libertarians are always "losing at everything" ? Mixed economies dominate the developed world, after all.
(Bias report: Libertarian Socialism)
Their ride-alongs are a real problem, optically. You start a political movement that is all about freedom, and a couple decades latter people only know you as "Republicans but weed".
I pre-emptively apologize for the snark, but still: from where I'm standing, Libertarian Socialism is one of the few political philosophies that is actually doing *worse* than vanilla Libertarianism. Thus, perhaps, the riders aren't exactly the problem. Especially since ye olde dictatorial Socialism is enjoying a bit of a resurgence right now (in a limited fashion).
I think their problem is most of the sensible, appealing object-level things they stand for are mostly already being done (or at least spoken about) by neoliberals and centrists in office, and most of the other stuff they talk about is off-putting or unappealing at an object level to most people.
Note that this was not the case 30-40 years ago, and that change is an argument against the "always losing at everything" premise. I am not that old, but I am plenty old enough to remember when same sex marriage equality, drug legalization, and sex work legalization were fringe positions and most non-libertarians thought that only those crazy radicals would actually believe in such things.
I understand that marriage equality and drug legalization are consistent with Libertarian ideas; but is there any evidence to suggest that Libertarians have made any significant contributions to the change in these policies ?
Well, they were part of the LP platform when Ed Clark ran in 1980 IIRC, when very few non-libertarians were advocating them, and that may have played some part in getting them into the Overton window. Much of the rest of whatever influence there was probably happened via libertarian participation in coalitional, non-libertarian-branded organizations like the ACLU and NORML.
The author of Coyote Blog was a big part of the state-level push to pass marraige equity laws. Until it became popular, and all the right thinking progressives discovered he was a yucky libertarian and kicked him out of the possition, apparently without consulting the dictionary definition of irony.
IIRC, they didn't so much have a problem with his libertarian self, but with the fact that he was persuading (some) conservative Republicans to get on board with gay marriage and the progressives wanted to preserve that as a "this is why conservative Republicans are Pure Evil" wedge issue.
But that's based entirely on Coyote's reporting; I'd really like to see what the other side had to say about it at the time.
For sure. Similar process to the 'what happened to internet atheists' entry, basically evaporative cooling - they won, most moved on to other thing, those who didn't are different than those who were there originally.
It's really hard to get political support when you want to take away all the opportunities for graft. Also, it turns out that people really like Bread And Circuses.
Two reasons:
1. In freeish democracies, few voters really want freedom; they are more interested in using their votes to tell other people what to do.
2. Libertarians themselves are an independent-minded, contentious lot, who often have difficulty playing well with others. Just look at the state of the US Libertarian Party this month.
That seems to prove too much, that markets should never work at all.
The counter-argument is that a "free market" needs rule of law to operate and that a government is necessary to enforce that rule of law.
To add to this, yes, black markets can operate without extensive rule of law. But there are no black markets in capital goods.
Law merchant is a counterexample, documented in The Enterprise of Law by Bruce Benson.
If you can just get everything you want by coercion, why bother with exchange? Maybe the thought you were trying to express makes sense, but the way you expressed it doesn’t. Maybe you just want to say a cap will never happen because most people don’t want to try it?
Freedom is a public good.
Are libertarians just utilitarians who happen to think that freedom has utilitarian benefits to other ultimate ends, and would abandon freedom in a heartbeat if they saw good evidence to the contrary?
Personally I think that for 'libertarian' to be a meaningful and interesting label, it must refer to people who place some amount of value on freedom/liberty as an end in and of itself, rather than a means to an end.
"1. In freeish democracies, few voters really want freedom; they are more interested in using their votes to tell other people what to do."
You make this sounds like a bad thing. The unspoken implication here is that people just want to be busybodies, telling their neighbors what color to paint their house or preventing others from smoking weed. But telling other people what to do also subsumes telling them not steal, dump toxins into the water, or make employees work 100 hour weeks else they get fired. So this statement "using their votes to tell other people what to do" tries to use a very broad brush to paint a picture with a specific mood. I think we should be more precise in our generalizations.
You have a point, but you overstate it. The distinction he was making is unclear in his statement, but it exists. No one wants to be murdered, so a rule against murder is pretty much unanimous. Rules about paint colors are zero sum games between groups with different taste.
Rules about paint colors make that cities remain looking somewhat harmoniously. On such issues, I'd rather have me losing, than no one winning at all.
This is one of my main problems with libertarianism - it assumes that preferences are fixed and invididual ("I want a green house") instead of contingent and social ("I want all houses in my street to look harmoniously together").
This is also, imo, why the ideology attracts so much people on the spectrum and a kind of "rugged einzelgänger", because these people actually tend to have very specific and fixed preferences.
>Rules about paint colors make that cities remain looking somewhat harmoniously.
No doubt.
>On such issues, I'd rather have me losing, than no one winning at all.
That is nice rhetoric but not really much of an argument. If that is actually the choice you face, you can either persuade other persons to agree with you or try to force them to obey. If you are calling for force, what is your justification?
>libertarianism - it assumes that preferences are fixed
How did you get that impression? I would have said it was the reverse. I am interested to hear why you think so.
>and invididual ("I want a green house") instead of contingent and social ("I want all houses in my street to look harmoniously together").
Are you saying there are no voluntary means for pursuing the end of “I want all houses in my street to look harmoniously together"? Is compulsion more social than consensus?
>This is also, imo, why the ideology attracts so much people on the spectrum
Pop psychology has little to do with what is true, possible, or right. We could apply the similar logic to all ideologies. If so, what shall we conclude?
I appreciate serious criticism and invite you to expand on your reaction.
My foremost reservation about libertarianism has to do with dealing with risk. Nozick based his justification of the minimal state on the risk created by persons who opted out of the dominant protection scheme. If their rights can be violated just because others fear them, without them actually causing harm or dispute, this seems to open to door for many rights violations. Rothbard mapped out the opposite extreme, advocating that only actual harm was relevant, not risk. But interpreted uncharitably, that would mean that attempted murder is not a crime, so long as it fails without actually injuring anyone. This does not seem acceptable either.
My gloss of Nozick may be uncharitable. I think he called for full compensation for the dissidents, which at least places some sort of limit on things. But if compensation was really full, a deal could be arranged voluntarily, rather than being imposed involuntarily. But the bargaining provides a difficulty. Nozick simply declares that providing free protection services to the dissidents should suffice. But this gives all the paying citizens/customers an incentive to opt out.
Anyhow, I think libertarians need a principle that tells us when putting someone else at risk counts as a violation of their rights and when it doesn’t. I am not aware of anyone having addressed this issue adequately, including conservatives, liberals, fascists, communists, progressives or social democrats. It seems to be handled ad hoc.
Too spectrumy?
I think a lot of this is that if you believe governments are dysfunctional and free markets are the best place to be, spending decades in politics is going to seem drastically unattractive. So the people with truly libertarian mindsets end up building giant business empires and then attracting conspiracy theories by funding right wing thinktanks (see: Koch Brothers), meaning those who are left in the quasi-public sector advocating for libertarian politics tend to be not that high achieving.
In contrast, the political left sends its "best" people into battle because they intuit that the public sector is really, really great and only governments can solve the really big and important problems.
To be noted: a giant business empire is one of the least libertarian communities one can imagine. It's got an almost military level of heirarchy and organization, and your freedom to disagree with the dominant paradigms is approximately zip. So if you're a captain of industry and call yourself a libertarian, you almost certainly mean "when you're not at your job in my company."
My cynical take: winning democratic elections involves, at least in part, handing out goodies to reward loyal constituencies or to win over new ones. A political philosophy that says goodies are theft and promises to get rid of them is not going to prove a successful strategy.
Another big facet of democratic politics is building durable coalitions out of disparate groups. For people who make individualism their sine qua non, they tend to be somewhat disagreeable by nature, and thus don't readily form stable groups to begin with, and to the extent they do, they're terrible at turning groups into coalitions.
I'm under the impression that the economy was a rather different mix before Reagan and Thatcher came along.
LIbertarians are an excellent goad and loyal opposition, but they suck at actual governance. They can't even rule *themselves* and they have no good ideas about how to rule others*. So, yes, they will always lose elections so long as voters have any sense at all -- but *in the process of losing* they may very well have significant and important influence.
-------------
* To be fair, it's hard to expect more from a philosophy that at line 1 rather eschews the entire concept of one man telling another what to do for arbitrary or purely practical reasons -- which is almost a definition of "government."
Do you mean in the sense that few officeholders have a big L next to their name or the sense that policy isn't moving in a libertarian direction?
These two metrics for winning are not the same and can sometimes be in opposition (e.g. when UKIP got what they wanted, rendering themselves irrelevant as a protest party)
Yeah, if it’s popular it can’t possibly be a mistake.
The circle encompassing "Don't tread on me, I should be free to smoke, shoot guns, employ 8 year olds, and drive without a seatbelt" people and the circle encompassing "Willing to learn Serbo Croatian and live with mandated government health insurance" peopl don't seem like they'd have much overlap.
The Black Hammer section really made me smile. I feel sanguine about it, and apparently so does Black Hammer.
MARS NOT MARX!
(or is it "Musk not Marx"? Doesn't have the same ring to it)
Look at the advantages of Mars over Montenegro:
- Naturalization: Montenegro: never. Mars: upon arrival.
- Current population: Montenegro: 600,000 people. Mars: 3 rovers.
- Naturalization by investment: Montenegro: ~$1,000,000. Mars: $200,000.
- Existing laws: Montenegro: over 1,000,000 pages. Mars: 1 paragraph in the Starlink ToS.
- Available land: Montenegro: "what land"? Mars: go wild! (literally)
- Expected time until libertarians can exert serious influence: Montenegro: never. Mars: even before take-off.
- Risk tolerance: Montenegro: average. Mars: do you even have to ask?
- Intelligence: Montenegro: average. Mars: probably < 90 if you are stupid enough to sign up.
- Endorsement: Montenegro: FSPE. Mars: Musk. Which of these has the record of getting things done? Exactly.
Disadvantages of Mars: their public transit is crazy expensive, the climate is too cold for me, and the air quality is terrible.
Also applies to Wyoming.
I'm more worried about the air quantity.
Oh, there's plenty of air on Mars. It's just really spread out.
Also chemically combined with iron.
If you keep writing about the progress of these projects I will become a paying subscriber! These fascinate me
I'm very conflicted about what my takeaway from this blog should be. Scott is a Libertarian, and I (like many other readers) am sympathetic to Libertarianism. However, at the same time, he writes about Moloch, which can only really be solved by a benevolent dictatorship or some other form of government that solves the biggest coordination problem known to humanity. He talks about the state guiding charter cities in order to really upliftment millions out of poverty.
So every individual should be completely free both socially and economically, but there should be someone at the meta level who is coordinating all our actions?
I’d say that libertarianism and state-driven coordination are compatible. There is that whole branch of “state capacity libertarianism”, after all.
If you see molochian coordination problems as sapping people’s freedom just as government regulations can, then the government can have a role in enabling freedom, not just restricting it.
Or, to put it in a more snappy phrasing: many (most?) libertarians are not anarchists.
Almost no libertarians are anarchists. At least, I've been "libertarian" my entire adult life (participated in the 1980 election campaign), and I've never met a libertarian who advocated no government. Rather, I see libertarianism as more of a political or social *tendency*, centered on Thoreau's dictum that government is best which governs least.
This idea that libertarians advocate anarchy and zero government is a strawman regularly trotted out by members of all other traditional political persuasions.
Thanks! This puts the article into perspective (and addresses my incorrect view of Libertarianism)
Is Scott even libertarian in some well-defined sense or in common usage sense? Isn't there some contradiction between voting for Warren in the primaries and colloquial usage of "libertarian" in the US? (honest question, as I don't understand US politics very well; also, did he change his mind about everything in https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertarian-faq/?)
My main take away from reading this blog is that the space of ideas and the space of possibilities are vastly greater than the tiny slice that we let ourselves explore, and we should let people explore more of them (e.g. because solutions to our problems are hidden there). To me this seems like the main overlap between libertarianism and Scott's views (see e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/).
In US politics we often use the phrase "X-leaning" to describe someone who is largely sympathetic towards a minority viewpoint, but inevitably tends to vote for major party candidates on something approaching the "lesser evil" logic.
So Scott would be a "libertarian-leaning" progressive, meaning he is much more sympathetic towards libertarian views than the average progressive. Similarly, I would be a "libertarian-leaning" conservative, because while I am highly sympathetic towards libertarian values, at the end of the day, I decided my vote was better applied to Trump than to Jo Jorgensen.
(I'm hoping this counts as a non-CW answer to a question that was inherently about politics)
A pity. I voted for Jo Jorgensen so I could smugly condemn as misogynists everyone I knew who voted for the white males.
I think Scott understands that there is absolutely no reason to believe that there exists some simple, uniform solution to all our problems, and if there does exist such a thing, it isn't well-described by any existing label.
Thanks for the link! I have avoided reading the Anti-Libertarian FAQ in the past because of its length (and my minimal understanding of economics), but I read the whole thing this afternoon. Although my recent reading my ACX somewhat convinces me that Scott has gradually become more Libertarian than this FAQ (written in 2014) would suggest, it puts this article along with "How Asia Works" and "Meditations on Moloch" into a largely self-consistent framework.
I think Akoncity, a planned 200 acre, 6 billion dollar enterprise by rapper Akon deserves mention, if only for the over the top bio-punk aesthetic: https://akoncity.com/
Unfortunately, all the available information appears to be written in futuristic real estate word saladese:
"AKONCITY.. it is Senegal rivalry futuristic development to become the beacon of innovation and human development by providing the best education solution, to lead the economy of the country creating the most revolutionary industry, rewarding Senegalese hard work for making Senegal the leading country in technology innovation and natural resources best used by providing the best housing with at most futuristic design comforting the daily life with mixed use of entertainment and services for all types of residential buildings (social, middle class and high end)."
This is unusually bad word salad. It looks like the author isn't a native English speaker. Maybe they should have gotten Akon to write it.
I was going to nominate Akoncity for the next round of these. I heard ages ago that Akon was using his money to build a city in Senegal, but it sounded like just one of many tech incubators in developing countries. Then I checked back a few years later and it’s this insane marketing firm extravaganza of vaguely defined spaces in buildings that all resemble designer sex toys.
How 'bout starting a model company and having a town /community grow around it?
(Well ya gotta figure out what the company will make.)
You could just copy the 'Amish'!
Let's say one hypothetically wished to found a separatist city-state and managed to achieve a large-enough group of people willing to follow you to this new attempt at utopia. What systems do you put in place to guarantee the best possible result?
For instance, one could implement systems to cull some of those wishing to join. "No violent felonies" is always a good place to start, and I imagine a number of people in the rationalist community would elect to implement a minimum IQ or a minimum net worth. Others might want to survey for compatible values, or require a donation to fund the city-state and perhaps be a measure of commitment to its well-being.
What ideologies, values, and systems would separate your city-state from others? Other than state-subsidized Modafinil, that is.
One big thing will be to ensure a good age/gender balance. A lot of these projects seem to attract young men, and few people want to live in a town that is 90% single guys. You need women, families, children, and elderly in any society.
"require a donation" sounds a lot like taxation, and, in fact, that is the only taxation I'd like for my community: a flat yearly fee for every resident. This would incentivize high-income people to move in and it would keep the riff-raff out. It would also eliminate all the costs and market distortions caused by other systems of taxation. Plus, it's the only reasonably fair system of taxation – everyone pays the same fee and everyone is entitled to the same services.
If this succeeds who would pay disability allowance or pensions for people who didn't manage to save up? These people sound like riff raff that won't be let the new shiny society and yet that's where all the tax base will be
There would be no gift tax, so anyone would be free to do that. I don't at all understand your conclusion about the tax base.
The libertarian-exacerbated bear problem in Grafton, NH sounds like more than a “snafu” from what I’ve read.
The bear problem was, as I recall, came about only because it is illegal to shoot them. If you could shoot them there’d be no problem at all, but the federal government intervened and overruled them.
Black Hammer seems to have explicitly adopted original sin and "extra ecclesiam nulla salus".
You've read Nixonland already but Black Hammer really reminds me of the black kids who would go to MLK events to boo him for being a weak moderate and then demand money from naive white people for 'our brothers in prison' (page 211)
These things can also happen spontaneously. An example, from close to where I grew up, is Åland Islands. It is Swedish speaking, but goes under Finnish law (with a substantial amount of autonomy from mainland Finland), so when Sweden outlawed homeschooling, they started attracting new citizens. I think the numbers of families homeschooling is at 5 percent now, and it has been doubling every year for 5+ years, so this group (consisting to a large degree of an unholy alliance of hippies and libertarians) could conceivably become a major political force in the Island Government in a few years. That could lead to a lot of new possibilities for developing better modes of education.
(We see a similar trend at the island where I live, Bornholm, where German families tend to escape if they want to homeschool.)
And I assume there are other, similar developments, in other areas, caused by differences in legal codes.
Such actions remain situational, how far can they go without an initial purposeful plan?
No idea. It might turn shapeless and fizzle out if there isn't someone that can channel the network power and give it direction. Don't know the history of interest groups congregating for random reasons.
Note that the Åland islands have very severe restrictions on who gets to but property on the islands in order to maintain its cultural distinction from mainland Finland so it would be hard to pull off a Free State Project there. You need some kind of family connection to move there as far as I remember (it's been a while since I looked into it) so don't expect any great inflow of libertarian-minded Finns or Swedes who could tip the scales closer to a Nordic An-capistan anytime soon
*buy property. Even right to abode is limited if memory serves.
Yeah, that's a bit of hassle. You need to rent for five years before you can buy a property on the main island. On many of the smaller islands there are no such rules.
"Still, it is a cool idea. "
No, it is an asshole idea. Its basically a hostile takeover or an invasion. The plan is take over a place and then enforce your politics on other people. That is just one or two steps of evil away from invading a foreign country and stealing the natives land.
Oh yeah? Would you still feel the same if your state, or the US, was taken over by paleo-conservatives, or venezuela-style marxists, or islamists ?
Food for thought: is the Free State Project more comparable to point A below, or to point B?
A. Gentrification. A mostly-poor community sees an influx of well-off outsiders who buy property, move in, and supplant the old social/political/business networks with new ones. They change the nature of the social community, and bring in new, higher-cost-to-consumer businesses that displace the businesses which used to be touchstones of the community.
B. Immigration. A large number of people who are not burn into the local culture, and have limited understanding of local politics, move into the area. They may bring new workers (which affects the base rate of wages), may not be cognizant of local law and custom, and may introduce social trouble due to that lack of awareness.
Neither of these has to rise to the level of hostile takeover before they generate lots of political and social stress.
In the United States, these two things are considered troubling by opposite ends of the political spectrum, for reasons which appear not to be fully thought-out.
In my mind, both patterns of behavior are similar, and both can be described as a prelude to hostile takeover. Even if the hostile takeover wasn't the intent of the people involved.
What do you think?
It's worth keeping in mind that *part* of the reason NH was selected as the state for the FSP (who came up with the concept prior to selecting an actual location) was because it was already fairly libertarian-leaning. We are talking about the state whose motto is "Live Free or Die," you know?
So even if you think of it as a hostile takeover, it's not *that* hostile. It's not like they are moving to a far left state and trying to turn it far right. They're moving to one of the most libertarian states in the union and trying to make it even more libertarian. If you're someone who hates libertarianism and thinks it's a stupid and failed philosophy - why exactly are you living in New Hampshire in the first place?
Thanks for your thoughtful response.
I think that both are ethically problematic.
(A) The benefits of gentrification (if any) should be carefully weighted against the massive damages they cause. The affected community should have at least some veto power.
I also have *some* sympathies for NIMBYs.
(B) I hold the opinion that immigrants have an ethical obligation to assimilate into the host culture. Moreover, I think it is ethically wrong to emigrate to a country whose culture you don't like.
I'm curious as to how you give the affected community veto power without stepping on property rights. If I own real estate in a poor community, and I decide to sell to some rich big-shot, what standing does anyone have to tell me I can't? Can laws be passed to limit real estate price, or what it can be sold for? Do such laws already exist?
Oh, I wouldn't mind stepping on property rights, at least a little bit.
But I was rather thinking of something like requiring community approval for new buildings.
And if zoning laws can keep poor people out, they can also be adjusted to keep poor people in. Vienna is doing this : iirc they requiere new buildings to have something like 30% low-cost appartments.
The Osha cult did this in Oregon back in the 80's. Basically took over a whole town and then got laws and policies changed to benefit the cult (as profiled on the Neflix doc "Wild Wild Country.") I can understand why the "natives" were upset.
The Mormons were doing it in the 1830s. This is why people kept killing them until they finally fled to Utah. People need to remember there's a certain social compact behind democracy, and if you egregiously violate that compact while abiding by the letter of the law, you can't always expect everyone else to uphold the letter of the law. Sometimes, it turns out, they'll shoot you in the face and then declare the killers innocent at trial.
I've read of right-wing blogs (and with links to mainstream news stories to back them up) about Somali immigrants taking over various counties in Minnesota and Michigan.
Well, except the "one or two steps" might involve "having superior ethics." If all the angels move to Hell and vote out Satan, that would be a good thing, notwithstanding Satan and his archfiends are deprived of their property (the souls of men).
Your argument is based on an unexamined assumption that all politics are morally equivalent. Generally, we acknowledge that they are not. What makes you assume they are in this case?
Do the original residents agree about invaders' superior ethics? As resident in another small European country, I certainly do not like idea that organized action by foreigners to move in and improve the ethical norms of how our state functions. It sounds suspiciously like the justification presented by both Lenin and Stalin.
Peace of Westphalia established a precedent against correcting, in favor of each state possessing a right to determine what is thought as the normative ethics in that sate as far as the state is concerned. If your ethical principles dictate that Montenegro is Hell, their current rulers are as morally corrupt as Lucifer himself, and you have a right -- no, a duty to start a crusade to bring the joys of Liberty there, I have not much realistic chances of convincing you otherwise, but nobody has any duty to accept your framing.
In general, it is considered a good thing to let other nations to live their lives as they see fit in country that has been recognized by other nation-states as belonging to them. I would prefer your superior ethics would spread by convincing arguments instead of coming here and pushing me around.
(1) I operate from the model that the effects of enforcing a policy on a native population have two components :
(a) The quality of the policy
(b) a massive negative effect from the enforcement
You would have to be pretty confident that your policy is really much better, to compensate for (b).
(2) Given the fact that most political ideologies consider themselves morally superior, the idea that it is a good thing to invade some place and enforce your superior morals on them is quite dangerous. More generally, "It's not evil if *we* do it" is a meme that I would love to see exterminated.
(3) Given the facts that - (a) libertarianism is a fringe believe in the US, and (b) it is even around these parts only a minority view, and (c) if you zoom out to look at the entire world it starts looking pretty much like a weird culture-specific quirk of the US - I think you cannot justify the high level of confidence that you would need to justify its imposition on unwilling natives.
This is not about taking over, but about supporting and strengthening local libertarian tendencies, working exclusively through them. The status of non-citizens guarantees this legally - unlike in-country movement, any coercion is impossible here, these are not Cortez's troops.
Let's lay out *all* the ups and downs, shall we? You're a minority who finds the policies imposed on you by the majority (in essentially all places) intolerable. Here are all the options I can think of:
1) Live in misery forever.
2) Revolt and get massacred.
3) Emigrate to terra nullius.
4a) Emigrate to somewhere that isn't terra nullius; massacre the inhabitants.
4b) Emigrate to somewhere that isn't terra nullius, and in which you'll form a majority; take over the government by peaceful means.
#3 is best, but we ran out of terra nullius a long time ago (if people get enough wealth to afford subsistence on Antarctica or space stations, we could get more, but that isn't the case now). #2 and #4a are kind of terrible. And #4b dominates #1 under utilitarianism, because even if you make the prior inhabitants miserable, you outnumber them (they can also emigrate and be non-miserable).
Zionism (and let's be frank, here - this is totally what the Zionists did) *is* kind of an arsehole move, but there are definite upsides to it (also, if you close off all of someone's non-miserable non-violent options, you're counting on their better nature to prevent them becoming a terrorist).
On the project in Montenegro, 95% of our main activity is in the telegram, we have not yet found a better platform and are concentrated there. At the same time, basically everything is in Russian - https://t.me/Seasteading_EastEurope
but there is also a small community in English - https://t.me/FSPE_Montenegro
I nevertheless invite everyone interested to get to the telegram, this is a very ergonomic social network, relevant even without our project
It occurs to me that the Great Pandemic of 2020 may have given all of these projects a boost, if they can move fast enough to take advantage of it. One of the problems with e.g. the Free State Project is that the sort of libertarians who are most likely to make it viable (or the sort of POC most likely to make Hammer City viable, etc), are the ones most likely to already have established careers and social networks that would not survive moving to Random Isolated Low-Population Enclave. And the ones most likely to make the move will be the ones with the least to lose. Which will include some contingently-capable people who can flourish but only in a community tailored to their needs, but even more of the generally-incapable losers in the movement.
I think a lot of people are greatly overestimating the extent to which "work from home and socialize on Zoom!" is going to be the Wave of the Future, but it's a lot more thinkable and at least somewhat more practical than it was two years ago. I don't think it will be a huge effect, but I could be wrong. Has anyone looked to see if there's been an uptick in e.g. the number of libertarians moving to Grafton, or to NH generally, over the past year?
Not only that, but the pandemic also seems to have proven that federalism isn't quite as dead as we thought, and that having a solid governor and/or legislature can actually matter *a whole freaking lot* to one's quality of life, even if the Feds are a bunch of incompetent tyrants.
"Who cares if you take over a state? Washington DC will just wreck everything" seems like less convincing of an objection today than it would have two years ago. Thanks, Ron DeSantis!
It would be great to see all the people who think everyone can work from home move somewhere together. I mean, after a year or so, when it dawns on them that someone has to actually fix the sewers, manufacture and install toilets, grade roads, plant and harvest crops, bake bread and deliver it, wire up telephone lines, et cetera, and none of this -- in fact, none of the overwhelming bulk of what makes a functioning modern society function -- can be done by uploading updated code to Github.
Being of a naturally suspicious and crabbed nature, I think the solution there would be "As for living, our servants will do that for us". Which is to say, the idea would be to hire on the native (Hondurans or whomever) who live outside the new charter city to do all the scut work of street sweeping, wiring up lines, working on the roads, etc.
So you'd get the Charter City Citizens who are all telecommuting and earning huge (by local standards) salaries, and the local people who are the cheap labour and just take the bus to work in the morning and back home in the evening out of the City. The benevolent paternalism there would be "we're giving employment and helping the local economy to improve", the less nice view of it would be "Saudi-type 'migrant workers'" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_workers_in_Saudi_Arabia#Abuse_and_scandals
Hopefully France will keep vetoing the access of new countries in the eu. Nothing personal and I am really sorry for the people of the Western balkans but our union is already disfunctional enough with 27 states with veto power over everything that matters.
Charter cities are very interesting as an idea, but I remain skeptical until we see a major success. Running a city is difficult and expensive, and the ideological bent of many charter founders leads me to suspect that they may be more in it for ideology than execution. Whether you're libertarian or anarchist or communist, SOMEONE has to do the hard/frustrating/expensive work of executing the many complex things that allow a city to function.
It's also important to note that most cities rely on funding from state and federal sources for significant portions of their budgets. This may not be essential to a successful city, but it certainly disadvantages charter cities which may not have access to such funding.
I'd be much more persuaded by an execution-oriented charter - a charter formed by people who are very passionate about making a great city per se - than by these ideological charters.
Prospera's advisory board includes Oliver Porter, who developed the "outsourced government" model of Sandy Springs, GA; Jeffrey Singer, former CEO of the Dubai International Financial Centre; Shanker Singham, a leading expert in international trade law and more. These are people with exceptional experience in real world projects. Sandy Springs and the DIFC work well. Media tends to emphasize an ideological angle, but the reality on the ground is much more execution oriented. Oliver Porter may know more about writing public/private contracts so as to align incentives than anyone alive. He can certainly get into the weeds on this kind of an issue with anyone.
I note, however, that Sandy Springs is moving away from the outsourced government/PPP model:
"In 2019, the Sandy Springs City Council moved to scale back the PPP model, directly hiring 183 contract employees, leaving only 15 outsourced full-time workers by the end of 2019. The city will still outsource a number of services, including the city attorney's office, as well as security, street sweeping and ambulance services. The move is expected to save $2.7 million in the next year and more than $14 million over 5 years."
That's interesting information.
I thought that cities were almost all net contributors to the hinterlands. IE, the city residents pay out much more in state and federal taxes than they take back in in state and federal benefits. If that's the case, if only city taxes have to paid, they could be lower while still being adequate for the city budget.
That's true, I suppose, assuming that the residents of the city don't have to pay federal taxes... Is that the arrangement for some of these charters?
"African, Indigenous, and Colonized people"
Oh great, another new term to learn.
"paying reparations for all that’s been stolen in your name."
But wait! I am both White *and* a working-class Colonized person! Do I pay reparations to myself?
Yeah, I think this project can be best described as "interesting" (any thing more frank will only get the lawyers involved).
If you're looking for an Irish-ruled autonomous enclave within the borders of the United States, you can just go ahead and move to Boston :)
Don't you know that oppression and privilege have nothing to do with history or economics, it's purely about your skin color? Remember, race is a social construct but oppressed/privileged status is inborn and easily determined by one's skin color, not the other way around.
But you see, this is the crux of my existential uncertainty here! I am a white person who is a citizen of a country that was colonised by a different bunch of white people. Am I an oppressor or am I privileged? Am I oppressing myself? Can I be oppressed at all, and if not, then what about The Eight Hundred Years?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTQPzfvkqhk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e9WDfg2idk
You're not American. I don't think this project would be asking for reparations from you.
KKKarl Marx wasn't American either.
Montenegro is beautiful and well worth a visit. Last time I was there, I had a Montenegrin explain to me how much better it was under Tito - at least it was predictable. I'm not sure libertarianism will rule the day there. :) I'm also not keen on ethnic/religious conflict.
If the impetus for this is coming mainly from Central and Eastern Europeans (if I'm reading this aright with the comment about their site being in Russian mostly), then okay, they can handle "centuries of division and tension along religious and ethnic lines" and worst comes to the worst, they can leg it across the Adriatic to Italy (the benefit of Montenegro).
On the other hand, if it looked like a bunch of Germans or Swiss were seriously interested in this, I'd rate its chances of success much higher.
People are selfish creatures, they will not participate in a migration project, no matter how rational in terms of logic, if it risks reducing their personal standard of living. Therefore, I very much doubt that people from developed countries will participate in the project with Montenegro. This is for us Montenegro is a combination of beneficial migration with an increase in the quality of life, as well as a political program. For people from richer countries, this is self-denial and too unlikely altruism.
It should be borne in mind that most of the participants in our project are anarcho-capitalists, and we consider the implementation of the minarchy's program to be fantastic, otherwise it was necessary to try to promote liberal reforms in their countries. And from the ankap's point of view, ethnic division is an important prerequisite for the transition to a competitive market government; Within the framework of an integral cohesive society with an ethnic monogroup majority, social contradictions are not strong enough to get away from the principle of a monopoly state. Therefore, what you consider to be a problem, in our opinion, represents a unique opportunity, since the conflict in Montenegro is still peaceful and is unlikely to reach a hot phase again.
Request comments from marxbro1917 on the Black Hammer thing.
You are a very naughty person (and yes, I admit, I had the same impulse myself) 😀
Please don't, seriously. I think a lot of the people who find his participation amusing seriously underestimate how unpleasant other people find it. In fact, if I anticipated that he would consistently show up to participate in the comments, I would not only stop bothering to read the comments, I would very likely stop visiting Astral Codex Ten at all in order to avoid reminding myself of the frustration.
He is pretty dedicated in showing up whenever someone talks about anything minimally adjacent to communism in order to demand that people provide their explanation on how possibly they can disagree with the Only Correct Understanding of Communism (which is his)
Having engaged with him a while back against my better judgment, I've come around to very strongly suspecting that he's not merely an uncommonly persistent and obtuse person, but a deliberate troll, and I find it frustrating how many members here actively solicit his participation.
I'm pretty skeptical of organized entrism, like the Montenegro thing. Collective action is difficult and mostly attracts crazy people. I prefer the invisible-hand approach of e.g. just moving somewhere with low taxes if you like low taxes – you instantly get what you want, and, as a bonus, you push the market in the right direction.
Has the Hong Kong experience taught you nothing? Reducing taxes is a situational policy, it will not in itself lead to a transition to contract jurisdictions, it is typical of less democratic regimes that, as their wealth grows, will undergo a democratic transition and, as a result, also slide into a large government of social populists.
No, I'm afraid I can't say it has – you'd have to enlighten me. I would naïvely say that the reasonable response to the deterioration of one jurisdiction would be to switch to another one, just like with any other supplier in the marketplace.
Over the past 100 years, the share of states in the economy has grown 10 times. Your migration will not be enough to change the policy of governments, they will find someone to parasitize without you. You do not yet have a normal state of the market for public services in order to fully consider it in this capacity. This can be formulated in your market analogy - if everyone around produces bad and outdated goods, then this is an opportunity to become an entrepreneur yourself and produce something better. It is foolish to sit at the dawn of personal computers and wait for Bill Gates with Jobs, when you, possessing the insider, can become one yourself.
But these people are not trying to create a more profitable government – they are more akin to Amnesty International than to Microsoft Corp. On the other hand, there are actual governments that are trying to entice profitable subjects by offering favourable conditions – basically free money for anyone willing to make the move.
if someone else does not do something that seems reasonable and profitable to you, then this is not a problem, but an opportunity for your own entrepreneurial initiative. Just following those who situationally slightly improve the situation is far from the most proactive model. In another hundred years, with this approach, the share of the state in the average world GDP can double again.
I think the most likely outcome if I tried to create my own jurisdiction would be failure. If instead I focus on those sectors of the economy where I have a comparative advantage, and buy governance from someone who has a comparative advantage in the governance sector, I am more likely to live a prosperous life.
The Shirley Temple thing freaked me out so I didn't go to their website, but I'm not sure how profitable running an 8 week bootcamp for $200 is. I assume people will need to eat and sleep over the two months in addition to learning all the great stuff they want to teach. But they're charging about $3/day, which doesn't seem to leave a lot for profit. Or maybe it's subsidized by all the money they're making from the Hammer City development
The "8 week bootcamp" is a total of 8 2-hour Zoom lectures you listen to at home.
The idea of a large number of like minded people moving to a small town to gain political control was tried in Antelope, Oregon in the 1980s. Hundreds of followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh moved to a nearby ranch, took control of the town, which had fewer than 30 residents, and re-named it "Rajneesh".
There were power struggles amongst the Rajneeshees, crimes were committed, including bio terrorist acts and attempted murder. The guru left the country, and the commune collapsed.
While I strongly sympathize with the original townspeople, the basic plan is legal. Except for the bio terrorism and murder, of course.
I still hope that the fate and program of the charismatic cult will be different from the mass decentralized movement.
You know, it's fascinating that in an era of absolutely unprecedented ability to communicate and see who thinks what about this and that, it is still possible for people to fall into the delusion that they and their friends are just the tip of some giant iceberg, a Silent Majority (or at least Puissant Minority that can fend off any interference from the unenlightened). All we need to do is raise the flag, get more visible, and stop sitting around and just talking.
Maybe it's psychological denial? Nobody *really* wants to believe that the vast mass of humanity is like just exactly what you suspect it's like from Facebook, Twitter, and CNN.
*I* don't believe the vast mass of humanity is like what you'd think from Facebook, Twitter, and CNN. Neither talking heads on tv, nor people who yell about politics online, are representative samples of humanity. And the people each of us sees yelling about politics online aren't even representative samples of people who yell about politics online.
Also in line with this topic is the Church of Scientology's "Project Normandy", their 50-year attempt to take over Clearwater Florida. (https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2019/investigations/scientology-clearwater-real-estate/)
If anyone knows the history of Montenegro, which mostly consists of the local clans charging down out of the titular mountain and kicking the everloving shit out of whoever was stupid enough to try to take it, they would know that it's a spectacularly poor candidate for this sort of thing. I've been there, they're lovely people, but if they genuinely thought the Free Staters were a threat, I think it would end...poorly...for the libertarians.
It's great that this is their unique feature and in other countries everything is different and for the libertarian transit there are huge prerequisites of mass psychology and culture (no)
I'm not sure about Montenegro specifically, but in general I think that sort of "mountain people" are reasonably tolerant of outsiders taking over the valley towns and putting up their flags so long as they stay out of the mountains. If Montenegro is taken over by Libertarian outsiders, I suspect most of them will be content to stay in their valley towns and telecommute while leaving the mountain clans alone. Maybe, especially if there's US-libertarian participation, they'd get some of the sort who think it would be great fun to go up into the mountains and match their AR-15s against Montenegrin AK-47s. Win-win-win?
Wait. London really bans people from carrying knives?
Except for small pocketknives, yes, and I think even those are discouraged. Because "knife violence" is perceived as a major social problem in the UK. British knife laws are the sort of thing that, if they didn't exist in the real world, The Onion would have made up as a parody strawman of the American gun control debate.
UK law is hilariously specific, specifically banning stuff I've never even heard of. I think you can get away with a multitool since there are non-stabbing reasons to have one, but pretty much nothing else. This is why why find the US discussion of guns so amusing over here.
https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives
The Australian state of Victoria bans people from carrying anything in public with the intent of using it in self-defence, IIRC.
Once again proving the value of good old fashioned fisticuffs!
by the way, the link to the discord has also been updated https://discord.com/invite/dDvsWMW2Ga
well, the site https://montelibero.org/
European Libertarians should probably just move to the Netherlands, the only even remotely actually liberal country in the EU.
I remember that you (the OP) also used to have a "Mantic Monday" column. You should keep this column and move this one to a different day.
I really feel like the U.S.A/China/anybody who wants the world richer should really lean into this charter city concept; they dont even have to back libertarian places, just like, not obviously bad policy charter cities.
HAHAHAHAHA!
Oh man, image of US libertarians trying to take over Montenegro made me actually laugh out loud in front of the monitor. So, for the benefit of Great Nation Of Murica and its not too East-savvy inhabitants, here's a 15 second intro:
There's a country called Turkey, which used to be Ottoman Empire for some centuries before and controlled to some extent huge area, including most of the Balkans. There were parts of Balkans they should have controlled but didn't. These were mostly Venetian, heavily fortified, backed by rich and influential republic and quite often islands/peninsulas/cut off by mountains. Also Ragusa (todays Dubrovnik), which is quite a jumble, so let's not go there, even though it's amusing jumble. And then there was Montenegro. Stuck between Venetian coastal strip on one side and Ottoman territory on all others, it managed to keep/regain some forms of autonomy or independence by consisting of mountain tribes of the most pig-headed, unrelenting, head-cutting bunch of highlanders you could find in the region that has, among others, Albanians.
They are in NATO these days and some of them are allegedly miffed about attempted Russian coup of 2016. Since this creeping takeover seems to be another attempt of spreading Russian influence through pan-Slavism, the miffed ones might not take kindly to them. Also lots of others voted in the new pro-Russian gov't recently, these might not take kindly to them as well - there's still this thing with US/NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, of which was Montenegro part. Libertarians of Ron Paul's ilk might do okay, if willing to be reduced to "voice of American freethinkers oppressed by globalizing global globalism". Even ignoring general not-taking-kindly-to-weirdo-immigrants-of-the-kind-I-dislike, there's more. You won't find libertarian leaning country in former Soviet Bloc, but I guess the ubiquitous shirking of statist requirements and lack of enforcement of laws might give you the illusion for a while. Once you really try to start and expand some enterprise or organize a political movement, it will very fast turn into Kafka or crime drama from Latin America.
As for fantasies that libertarians might be tolerated in Balkans because they are themselves tolerant, non-threatening and bringing benefits, sure. Explain this to locals. And don't forget to speak loud and clear - it's difficult to speak intelligibly when your cut off penis is stuck in your throat.
Anyway, while I've never been there myself, country is known to be beatiful, rakija strong and locals reasonably friendly, as long as you avoid some topics. Go visit once the travel gets normal, just don't buy any landmarks.
Black hammer society made my day
To what degree does the whole charter city concept contradict that "seeing like a state"-type notion of cities emerging organically? An efficient city that emerges organically presumably does so by selecting for skills that are relevant to making the city productive, such as attracting the best plumbers, carpenters, and hat store owners. What is neither particularly organic nor conducive to productivity is getting a bunch of people into one spot because they agree on free speech. Like at some point your city needs to actually get good at things, which would involve attracting people based on their plumbing, carpenter, and store owning credentials - but then you'll dilute the libertarian-ness of the project?
Besides, charter cities are supposed to be long-term projects, right? So how do they solve the institutional Succession Problem? For mean-reversion reasons these libertarians will probably have kids who don't really care about libertarianism. So how do they ensure the city remains libertarian?