I recently saw a Youtube video about a Libertarian new nation project known as the New Liberty Trust.
http://newlibertytrust.org/
Now, according to the site, they are looking for Christian minarchsits and basically want to try to create a new micro-state. I don''t know if the main proponent of this idea knows that the global movement for world peace tried this very technique or not. Regardless, at least he is taking action.
I think this method of acheiving liberty makes sense and is doable. The method being finding like minded people, grouping up, and going on from there to acheive common goals. This is not unlike the concept of neotribalism. I am interested in all of your opinions about this startegy for freedom or perhaps any of your own strategies for freedom that are doable right now.
I read this blog : ancapfreethinker.info, the post about the problems with the freedom movement. It stands to reason that these groups or projects would have to be ideologically similar to acheive any real traction.
Furthermore, it seems the culture, especially among younger people, is shifting such that people are working with eachother to acheive goals that are outside of the normal means of doing business. Examples of this I would site are the existence and success of kickstarter, crowdfunder, and the micro-loan phenomena.
For example, I would not be welcome in the New Liberty Trust community because I am a strong atheist. I also wouldn't want to join this particular group because they are minarchists and I am an ancap. However, I could see myself joining a similar group as long as its values reflected my own.
Feel free to comment, discuss, etc. I look forward to your insights.
acft:I am interested in all of your opinions about this startegy for freedom or perhaps any of your own strategies for freedom that are doable right now.
There's a long thread on this. (However, the ideas you find there might not be to your liking. It looks like you're looking for more extreme things that are suppose to create immediate freedom or thrust everything forward to an extreme degree, such as creating your own island (figurative or otherwise) paradise. Many of the suggestions there are more practical and methodical. So just be aware.)
Examples of this I would site cite are the existence and success of kickstarter, crowdfunder, and the micro-loan phenomena.
Just wanted to make sure you caught that. Quite a few people don't know about the difference. Wasn't sure if it was just a typo.
As far as creating a new community though, have you heard of the Seasteding Institute?
Yes, it was a typo. Thanks.
You are correct, I do prefer more immediate plans of action. I do not, however, have any desire to save the world or transform the nation and therefore I think a solution that is smaller in scale is practical.
I am aware of the seasteading institute but I do not think building islands makes sense. The institute also seems to be minarchistic in their approach and intent.
What strategy do you believe if feasible and worth while, if any?
acft:What strategy do you believe if feasible and worth while, if any?
We had some discussion about this here, and you actually kind of sound like the OP there. I would be interested to hear your own prescription before answering your question, because it sounds like you're not leaving anything on the table, while at the same time contradicting yourself.
You literally state: "they are looking for Christian minarchsits and basically want to try to create a new micro-state" and then claim "I think this method of acheiving liberty makes sense and is doable."
Now you tell me "I do not think building islands makes sense. The institute also seems to be minarchistic in their approach and intent."
This makes no sense. You said the Christian minarchist approach makes sense and is doable, yet you're complaining that the Seasteading Institute sounds minarchist, and apparently that makes it no good. Plus I don't understand how one could hope to achieve a "micro-state" (whatever the heck that is) on land that is already claimed by a much larger, globally recognized state.
You also say that I am correct in my assessment of the kind of suggestions you're looking for (extreme things that are supposed to create immediate freedom or thrust everything forward to an extreme degree, such as creating your own island (figurative or otherwise) paradise), but then immediately tell me you aren't trying to save the world or transform the nation. So I have no idea what you're looking for.
What exactly do you believe is feasible and worthwhile?
I explain what method I am talking about in the sentence right after the one you quoted when I said
"The method being finding like minded people, grouping up, and going on from there to acheive common goals."
I then expanded upon this method and explained why the values of this trust were different from mine.
"For example, I would not be welcome in the New Liberty Trust community because I am a strong atheist. I also wouldn't want to join this particular group because they are minarchists and I am an ancap. However, I could see myself joining a similar group as long as its values reflected my own."
You said "Plus I don't understand how one could hope to achieve a "micro-state" (whatever the heck that is) on land that is already claimed by a much larger, globally recognized state."
In the video I linked to they suggested organizing a large fund and offerring existing micro-states money for terratory. This is just one possible solution.
You said "You also say that I am correct in my assessment of the kind of suggestions you're looking for"
I said "You are correct, I do prefer more immediate plans of action."
Meaning you are correct when you say I prefer extreme things that are supposed to create immediate freedom. I then stated explicitly that I don't endorse the island making idea.
You said "I would be interested to hear your own prescription before answering your question, because it sounds like you're not leaving anything on the table"
Again, the method I endorse is finding like minded people, grouping up, and going on from there to acheive common goals. These goals can be anything from starting a business, securing land for the use of thr group, or a new nation project. I have more but I wanted to hear other ideas before I posted my own.
You said "So I have no idea what you're looking for."
I said "I am interested in all of your opinions about this stategy for freedom or perhaps any of your own strategies for freedom that are doable right now."
and
"Feel free to comment, discuss, etc. I look forward to your insights"
I am looking for opinions about the new nation strategy I linked to and about the methods that I already stated or any startegies or insights anyone else has on the topic.
Now that that is clarified, do you have any ideas to offer?
John James:As far as creating a new community though, have you heard of the Seasteding Seasteading Institute?
Just wanted to make sure you caught that.
If I had a cake and ate it, it can be concluded that I do not have it anymore. HHH
acft:Again, the method I endorse is finding like minded people, grouping up, and going on from there to acheive common goals.
a) I don't see how that's different from essentially any other proposal. It's like saying "my prescription is just good old fashioned hard work. Rolling up your sleeves and just getting it done."
b) That doesn't sound very extreme.
These goals can be anything from starting a business, securing land for the use of thr group, or a new nation project. I have more but I wanted to hear other ideas before I posted my own.
Exactly. See above.
What's a strategy that isn't "doable right now"? Or that doesn't fit in your umbrella that you already stated? It seems like I could say just about anything and it would fit into your general statement...meaning basically you would be in favor of whatever I say.
I am looking for opinions about the new nation strategy I linked to
I'm not sure how viable the idea of creating your own sovereign territory within an already established country is. I fail to see how that is any more plausible than creating an environment at sea.
They even made an episode of Family Guy on this very idea of someone having land that isn't officially part of the United States.
the methods that I already stated or any startegies or insights anyone else has on the topic. Now that that is clarified, do you have any ideas to offer?
Well, I did link you to a thread that has already gone on for 6 pages on this very topic, so it's not like I offered nothing.
ThatOldGuy: John James:As far as creating a new community though, have you heard of the Seasteding Seasteading Institute?Just wanted to make sure you caught that.
Hmmm. I'm almost positive I simply copied and pasted that from somewhere...either their website or the channel or one of the videos somewhere. meh. That's a more obvious typo. "site" and "cite" are both words.
Well, despite many years of protesting, voting, civil disobedience, educating, and other forms of activism, the US is in deeper debt, the dollar has inflated significantly, the government has gotten larger, is more tyrannical in terms of surveillance, violation of civil liberties, and is more aggressive militarily with multiple preemptive wars being fought and it is legally torturing people.
Therefore, I would say any of the strategies mentioned above that had the goal of countering the trends I mentioned have failed. I would not consider these strategies as doable, meaning that they can be used to achieve their stated end goals because they have already been tried for generations and have not worked and do not work now.
However, instead of trying to change national policy which requires billions of dollars and millions of supporters, it seems that it would be more logical to focus on a group that was much smaller and on more reasonable goals.
The examples of different strategies that I gave were starting businesses (legitimate) meant to enrich the members of said group, buying and securing land that the group members could exploit or live on, and/or forming new-nation projects. Although they have been tried in the past, these three ideas have not been tried nearly as often as the others I mentioned.
Furthermore, because there are fewer members necessary for these projects and because doing these things would cost less money than trying to buy an election, I think the goals of projects like these could be achieved in a matter of years and make a big impact on the lives of the people involved. For example, tomorrow I could go charter a corporation and with enough members contributing we could start buying apartment buildings.
Now I realize extreme is a subjective term, but the reason why some people might consider this extreme is because of the higher risk of personal financial loss. It might also require a great deal of effort on the part of the members of a given project to make it work. Someone who prefers sending $20 a month to get an e-magazine, for example, might consider these ideas extreme.
An example you gave was the seasteading Institute, which I agree is going in the right direction because it is a new nation project with a limited scope and with like-minded people. One example I gave was the New Liberty trust. Again I said I agree with this METHOD but I do not agree with the values of either of these individual projects.
I read the posts you linked to and they were indeed interesting however, as you correctly warned me they had ideas along the lines of what I do not see as effective. Do you have any personal strategies (if any) that you think would fit the model I have described. Also feel free to post any more comments or opinions. The same goes to everyone else.
Acft:
I'm planning an "island" society of my own, but in contrast to New Liberty, it will be completely pluralistic, be built on modular floating structures, require no application, and be what I call an 'essentialist' state, meaning a skeleton government with an individualist political structure.
That last point requires some explanation.
All modern governments today are predicated on socialism, in the sense that the locus of control within society rests with the group, typically via the mechanism of majority vote. America itself is predicated on this, with the additional concept of minority rights. However, it's clear at least to me that this grand experiment's flaws will eventually be fatal.
I propose a political structure predicated on individualism, meaning the locus of control would rest with the individual rather than the group, via the mechanism of micro-secession and the citizen-veto.
Under this system, each individual would only be subject to laws they agree to subject themselves to. The system then would be completely voluntaryist and have zero institutionalized aggression built into it in the sense that no laws would be forced on anyone, not even children born into the system.
Jurisdictions, in the form of cities, made up of the property limits of citizens that agree on a subset of laws, would likely arise, as people like to live together. They may even hire politicians to propose new laws for the city-jurisdction, but adoption is voluntary. (Admittedly, the role of a politician in such a society is the part I am fuzziest on right now, and in process of developing. The politician in today's world has the job of using force, and he would have very little to do in a society which prohibits the use of force except in incredibly defined moments such as an essentialist state.)
Anyone at any time can start a new jurisdiction with a set of laws they choose, but they cannot force anyone to join. Anyone can leave the society itself or any jurisdiction at any time.
Such a society would actually be tolerant of those choosing to live as extreme anarchists: meaning no government structure at all; they would simply start their own jurisdiction and allow whomever in they want without any contract to abide by any laws. It could tolerate even communism: meaning that those who accept communism and chose to live under it could do so--but no one could be forced to remain in such a jurisdiction if they wanted to leave.
The "essential" functions of the state would be just three things: protection from foreign aggression, protection of basic individual rights among all jurisdictions--serving as a counterpoint to city-jurisdictions to keep them honest (a sort of check&balance), and basic dispute resolution in the form of a court of last resort for contract disputes. These would not preclude the development of private police and courts, only serve adjunct to them
Now, I realize this sounds very fancy and impossible--nothing like this has been tried, what had been tried has been small, silly, and perhaps even trite. Unlike NL, I don't want to build merely a micro-nation, but rather want to colonize the world's oceans in the main and create large-scale societies, so the political system is geared towards large-scale development.
I hope to begin floating things off the California coast within the next decade, perhaps attracting some offshore manufacturing, businesses that would like the profitability boost of paying zero rent on floating land to build a plant on, and zero property tax, etc., offset with the annoyance of bringing people back and forth from the mainland.
By making profitability the draw, rather than trying to garner political-miscreants, I expect it to grow organically and rapidly. I'm looking into possibly making the ocean-borne production of biofuels like algae-based biodiesel a primary industry. In a zero-tax environment, and with so much available land and space, an ocean-produced biofuel could rapidly challenge the price of gasoline on the world market. That would take the world by storm, home-grown, sustainable fuel.
By such means, that is, by making ocean living economically attractive, I will grow a floating society the same way that the West was Won, with a biofuel-based gold-rush creating small towns out there, which turn into permanent communities.
At that point, it's just a matter of time.
Anyway, that's the plan.
acft:Do you have any personal strategies (if any) that you think would fit the model I have described.
Well, as I said, I think one could make just about anything fit into the model of "finding like minded people, grouping up, and going on from there to acheive common goals."
And if you're telling me that basically anything short of creating your own country is not good enough, but that starting your own country on land is no good, and starting a country at sea is no good, I honestly don't know what's left. As I said, you sound like the OP of this thread where basically everything is taken off the table.
Anenome:
This is seems like an innovative idea. Allow me some time to digest it, thank you for the thoughtful resopnse.
John said "Well, as I said, I think one could make just about anything fit into the model of "finding like minded people, grouping up, and going on from there to acheive common goals.""
I expanded on this here "The examples of different strategies that I gave were starting businesses (legitimate) meant to enrich the members of said group, buying and securing land that the group members could exploit or live on, and/or forming new-nation projects. Although they have been tried in the past, these three ideas have not been tried nearly as often as the others I mentioned."
John said "And if you're telling me that basically anything short of creating your own country is not good enough"
See above. I offer two other examples that are strategies that have not been tried as often. Indeed, if all of your ideas involve working within the system or doing the activities I identified as not doable or effective, then yes, you might not have anything to contribute here. However, you can suggest anyhing else outside that scope or any businesses, land acquisition, or new nation ideas you might have. Anything other than "protesting, voting, civil disobedience, educating, and other forms of activism"
John said "but that starting your own country on land is no good"
Please show me where I said starting a country on land was no good. I clarified that I was against the New Liberty Trust's value system, not method. I specifically identify this strategy (new nation projects) numerous times as one I agree with. It was you who said you were not sure how viable it would be.
Ok, I read through your plan a few times Anenome and I like a lot of it. For example, I like the fact that you have an industry in mind that is real and viable as a way of getting your economy growing. Another industry, perhaps, could be fish farming. Since you have open water all you would need to do is fence the fish in, presumably with a large netted area, and provide them with feed. There would be little to no cleaning costs because they are still in the ocean.
I would also say that starting in California is a good idea because of weather and the proximity of the tech industry.
One of the main challenges for these types of ideas is funding. Do you have any ideas on how to secure funding initially?
As for the government or state, how exactly are they going to be funded if there are no taxes? (I think iread it as no property taxes. Are there income taxes?) Is it subscriptions based, or maybe built into the price of goods or something? Perhaps government positions can be voluntary, thus eliminating any kind of financal incentive to stay in power?
I would also like you to explain a bit more about the legal system, namely, does the state government enforce a set list of laws or whatever laws the specific juristiction enforces in the case of the sate being used in a high court role.
As for the politicians, based on what they do in today's society I'd say just leave them out XD. If the laws adopted are voluntary it indeed does not seem like they need a role, but instead people would have to convince eachother of the value of a given new law.
Finally, have you thought about the technical side of your island(s)? One of the reasons I am skeptical about seasteading is because I trust solid ground moreso than man made platforms. However, I guess that if your idea was more like an aircraft carrier type of set up it would be pretty sturdy in rough waters. Still, I don't know if I would be comfortable out at sea, but that is just a personal preference.
I don't think your idea is impossible at all. If there is enough support it could definitely be done.
fyi instructions on how to quote, and other forum tips can be found here.
acft:I expanded on this here "The examples of different strategies that I gave were starting businesses (legitimate) meant to enrich the members of said group, buying and securing land that the group members could exploit or live on, and/or forming new-nation projects. Although they have been tried in the past, these three ideas have not been tried nearly as often as the others I mentioned." See above. I offer two other examples that are strategies that have not been tried as often.
See above. I offer two other examples that are strategies that have not been tried as often.
It seems as though a large part of your disqualification of ideas is that they haven't worked so far...yet you propose more ideas that have already been tried, with the simply caveat that they haven't been tried "as often". I don't quite see how this works. You're alleging that something is no good because it hasn't worked in the past, yet you admit you favor other things that haven't worked in the past based simply on some arbitrary line you've drawn between when something has been tried "sufficiently" to call it a failure versus "hasn't been tried enough".
Tell me, where exactly is this line? How many times does something have to be tried before it jumps that shark in your line of reasoning?
Indeed, if all of your ideas involve working within the system or doing the activities I identified as not doable or effective, then yes, you might not have anything to contribute here.
Indeed, you yourself identified your own ideas as not effective...and only qualified them by simply saying they haven't failed enough. I don't quite see how this is "contributing" anything new in the substantive sense.
However, you can suggest anyhing else outside that scope or any businesses, land acquisition, or new nation ideas you might have. Anything other than "protesting, voting, civil disobedience, educating, and other forms of activism"
So no activism, no business activity, no new nation building...but I need to create freedom tomorrow. Do you have anything to contribute along those lines?
Again, "I need some pragmatic suggestions on how to lose weight, but I don't want to exercise, change my diet, make any lifestyle changes, go into surgery or in general move or do anything that might cause me to lose weight.
Any suggestions?"
Okay fine, you think declaring your own Petoria in the middle of a globally recognized country, on essentially/ultimately federally owned land, and then abiding by your own law and disregarding those dictates of the surrounding country is a viable solution to create a free society.
Please explain what you will do when heavily armed agents with guns come to collect your property tax.
acft: Ok, I read through your plan a few times Anenome and I like a lot of it. For example, I like the fact that you have an industry in mind that is real and viable as a way of getting your economy growing. Another industry, perhaps, could be fish farming. Since you have open water all you would need to do is fence the fish in, presumably with a large netted area, and provide them with feed. There would be little to no cleaning costs because they are still in the ocean.
Thanks :) I have been investigating fish farming heavily, and I agree.
acft: I would also say that starting in California is a good idea because of weather and the proximity of the tech industry.
Exactly. We could easily host a lot of foreigners with HB-1 visa restrictions just as another project is doing now with a cruise-ship.
acft: One of the main challenges for these types of ideas is funding. Do you have any ideas on how to secure funding initially?
Funding, always a challenge. If I can make a sea platform economically viable, people will invest in it on that basis, and we can slip a state in later. Alternately, I could get the attention of Peter Thiel at some point :P But that's a long shot I think, until I have something to show at least.
I'll tell you what I'm doing now, I'm designing floating platform prototypes and working through how a modular dock system could be scaled up in size. I may start a floating dock production company as an intermediary, something a bit like www.candock.com.
acft: As for the government or state, how exactly are they going to be funded if there are no taxes? (I think iread it as no property taxes. Are there income taxes?)
As for the government or state, how exactly are they going to be funded if there are no taxes? (I think iread it as no property taxes. Are there income taxes?)
There's a combination of a couple things. There are no income nor property taxes, true. It will be constitutionally limited such that no one can lay any tax on you against your will, and any "tax" (actually subscriptions) you do agree to pay you can quit at any time. But I'll talk about that in a bit.
The only fees the gov would take are for service, meaning they're voluntary participation. So, I mentioned having law courts of last resort, primarily to take care of civil and contract disputes. Ayn Rand suggested a way to run these that I like, which is to have a court 'insure' the transaction. So, for a small fee, say 1.5% or less, you can have a court insure the transaction and adjudicate it rapidly or the like should there be a dispute. Without the insurance the cost of adjudicating it would probably be much higher and take longer. So, by this method, you'd try to make it something everyone would want on every transaction--but it would not be forced, naturally. Fee for service is much more just than broad-base taxation.
Other courts would be free to spring up, private courts, and make a similar bargain. But the government court of last resort can do one thing the others cannot, which is compel attendance in cases where one of the participants is unwilling to come to trial. That's why I cannot imagine a society possibly working without a court of last resort. Such usually occurs in criminal proceedings.
One of the problems with the Saracens civilization was that they had no civil law--this is Rose Wilder Lane's theory on them in Discovery of Freedom (which I beleive is hosted on this site in PDF form, and a wonderful read). Thus, the way things ended up working was the injured party would be the one enforcing a ruling on the injurer, and the result too often would be warfare, murder and the like.
acft:Is it subscriptions based, or maybe built into the price of goods or something? Perhaps government positions can be voluntary, thus eliminating any kind of financal incentive to stay in power?
I'm certainly thinking through all the options on how to deal with what limited governance would be needed in an essentialist state. I have thought of something similar to what you suggest here, in terms of voluntary service combined with subscriptions. Let me lay out the barest skeleton of my thought there, with apologies for its early state :P
Let's suppose we want something done as a society. That is, we want it done, but don't personally ourselves want to go do it. We're working. Let's say we want to hire someone to make a bridge which will be collectively owned by those who put up the money for it. So, there's a clear case for a representative. We elect a representative to achieve oversee construction, and he studies the issue and determines what it would cost for it to be produced. He puts out a call to the community in which it would reside, almost like a kickstarter project. If enough people fund the bridge and like his design, they go ahead with it and the subscriptions are charged.
That is a way that we could replace modern political methodology of achieving similar ends, all while remaining voluntary.
To take a more normal example, of a continuing process, suppose we wanted to institute welfare in a jurisdiction (I had said that living under communism would be possible wihtin a jurisdiction, so let's take a look, even though I would never do it myself :P)
If a community wants to setup welfare, they would create a rule via vote that anyone who joins the jurisdiction must sign-on to the welfare subscription. This subscription taxes via a graduated income tax (I use the word 'tax' loosely here, since it's a tax contained within a voluntary subscription. walk away from the subscription and the tax ends.)
They then vote on a representative to administer the funds received, etc.
acft: I would also like you to explain a bit more about the legal system, namely, does the state government enforce a set list of laws or whatever laws the specific juristiction enforces in the case of the sate being used in a high court role.
I'm a bit confused on what you really mean here, but I'll try to answer best I can.
Firstly, this system has a flatter governance structure than the US. The US is Federal, State, and city. I'm bringing it back to the historical usual, which is city-states, and binding them together under a confederal government, so the structure now is: Confederal, City-State. The City-state would not have jurisdiction over large undeveloped tracks of land like a US State does, but only jurisdiction over the property of its members, those who have voluntarily joined that jurisdiction.
As for the legal system, the confederal government's internal role is to do one major thing: enforce basic individual rights. What this would mean in practice is that the confederal gov exists to keep the city-states honest. Since everyone is under the confederal constitution, and have agreed to keep certain basic individual rights, the enforcement mechanism is the confed checking up on city-states with jurisdiction to investigate them, prosecute them (via a jury of their peers naturally) and in extreme cases for force change or even dissolve a jurisdiction.
So, as an example, all city-states are supposed to be respecting the freedom of everyone in them, allowing voluntary decisions in all aspects. But I'm sure some will begin to operate as if they control and own the people within them (especially certain systems predicated on this basis, such as a communist system or the like). The confed would investigate and break up a city-state if they find tyranny cresting.
So, the confed, and other city-states, can police the city-states and prosecute them under the constitution.
The main thing is to keep the Confederal government from becoming a tyrant on its own. So for that reason, I do not yet have it making any law at all. All law will be made at the city-state level, with the confed holding sacred purely the constitution. I might refine that at some point, we'll see. But, again, law adoption remains voluntary.
acft: As for the politicians, based on what they do in today's society I'd say just leave them out XD. If the laws adopted are voluntary it indeed does not seem like they need a role, but instead people would have to convince eachother of the value of a given new law.
Yeah, exactly :) 'Politician' isn't a good word for what people in this society who involve themselves in actually creating suggested law would actually do.
I've actually thought of leaving the role more to judges and police, since they would be in a position to both see the effects of any law created and to think of new ones that would cater to local situations. I've heard many cops say that the laws are stupid, and if the people who write them could see their effects they would change things.
In this society, anyone would be able to write a law, and essentially put it online and allow adoption to take place :P In that role they would be doing what a politician does now, in a sense, without all the negative things like party politics and vote buying, influence peddling, or lobbying. I've thought for a very long time on how to fix lobbying, and the only viable way is to open things up in this manner. Let a lobbyist write the law he wants--but he won't be able to force it on anyone.
We always talk about free competition of ideas in society--but this would actually create that. Why vote for politicians who promise certain laws but cannot deliver ultimately, let people adopt laws directly.
acft:Finally, have you thought about the technical side of your island(s)? One of the reasons I am skeptical about seasteading is because I trust solid ground moreso than man made platforms. However, I guess that if your idea was more like an aircraft carrier type of set up it would be pretty sturdy in rough waters. Still, I don't know if I would be comfortable out at sea, but that is just a personal preference. I don't think your idea is impossible at all. If there is enough support it could definitely be done.
Thanks :) As for this question, with the size of floating docks we're talking about, stability wouldn't be an issue. It would be functionally equivalent to land because of its gigantic mass. I found a sweet video of a similar idea to mine and I'll link it. This one uses linked hexagons--not sure I'll go with hexagons but they do have avantages. But the idea of floating linked platforms is more than doable. Building ones the size of city-blocks, also doable. You might even put canals between or under them, spaces for boats to travel by, and now you have water-roads that never need paving. here's the vid:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKWZBqSMU8U
Hmmm. It seems you put a lot of work into this idea. I think the candock.com concept is viable.
One thing I have been trying to think about is energy source. If a new nation project is going to succeed, it needs a steady source of energy. However, getting, storing and distributing fossil fuels might be problematic especially since it seems the Us is about to start another war over it soon (Iran). I saw Doug Casey talking about this company that produces mini nuclear reactors, really nuclear batteries, that produce a lot of power for long periods of time very cheaply and safely. They are supposedly designed to be transportable. This might be ideal for your idea since it is on the sea and the technology is based on the nuclear sub and aircraft carrier power plants.
http://www.gen4energy.com/
Now to address some of the other points that were raised.
At this point Peter Thiel seems to have both the motivation and the finances to help these new projects get under way. I would say that once you have a solid business plan and you figure out the details to give him a ring. Angel; investors always make things go easier.
Maybe you can call your island "Petoria" if he funds it XD
Compelling Attendance
As far as compelling someone to show up to court, I agree this can be a tricky issue. The danger is using force to compel innocent people to court. My work around for this is to simply pay compensation if indeed the person is innocent. With this compensation method in place, the harm of apprehending and basically kidnapping someone against their will, is compensated for by either the court or the party who paid for them to be apprehended.
“Politicians”
As for the "public servant" roles, I think there are benefits to both private competition and to volunteer positions. In both cases, there is no reason why the people involved can't be professionally trained on methods of thinking and weighing evidence. However, the volunteer system requires a sacrifice and I don’t think money hungry and power hungry people will be as likely to abuse the system.
I also am a fan of subscription based services that enable market competition. I think that special care needs to be taken to prevent unscrupulous people from taking advantage of the top court’s monopoly powers, few as they may be. It is difficult to think of a test that could be used to screen such individuals out.
“Public works”
You said “He puts out a call to the community in which it would reside, almost like a kickstarter project. If enough people fund the bridge and like his design, they go ahead with it and the subscriptions are charged.”
I like this idea a lot. This way no general funds are drained on the project and the items is more like a CO-OP. As long as the funding is voluntarily collected I think there would be little room to complain.
The Welfare scenario
Now, my question is if someone who had a subscription for law services and lived in that jurisdiction didn’t want to pay for welfare would they have to move? Could they unsubscribe but keep their place? If they did have to move, this problem could be averted by saying that anyone who stands to have a new law or fee imposed on them is paid fair market value plus 20% and moving expenses to relocate or something.
I guess another way to circumvent the problem of someone living in a jurisdiction, and then having people vote to change the terms of their subscription would be to make all votes unanimous in order to be enforced.
Other than that it seems it might create a situation like we have now where random people vote on something and my property taxes go up, but I can’t afford to move or do anything about it. I might be misunderstanding this part here.
Confed City-State
Ok, that did clear it up for me. City-states make and enforce their own laws and only when these laws conflict with the constitution( which lists the basic rights the City-States cannot infringe upon) will the Confed step in. Now, as a note, it seems like this would mean that the Confed would have to necessarily be stronger than the City-States OR have some method of rallying compliant City-States against non-compliant ones. Is this the case?
Funding the Con-fed – City States
As I understand it, there is an optional fee of varying % used to insure transactions in addition to subscriptions people acquire for private protection under a code of law they choose. Is this the case for the City-States funding, the Con-Fed funding, or both?
Law-“Making”
I think the open source approach to law making, where anyone can suggest anything and if it makes sense it can be adopted or not, is good so long as the Confed is there to make sure mob-rule does not step on any constitutional boundaries. It is definitely better than the system we have now. Without reps, there isn’t concentrated voting power on direct laws. Also, I would say that if anything, removing old laws should be made to be easier than adopting new ones so that laws and rules that are arcane can be gotten rid of easily whereas new rules are difficult to pass.
Have you thought about setting up an institute or some type of legal vehicle for your idea?
acft:One thing I have been trying to think about is energy source. If a new nation project is going to succeed, it needs a steady source of energy. However, getting, storing and distributing fossil fuels might be problematic especially since it seems the Us is about to start another war over it soon (Iran). I saw Doug Casey talking about this company that produces mini nuclear reactors, really nuclear batteries, that produce a lot of power for long periods of time very cheaply and safely. They are supposedly designed to be transportable. This might be ideal for your idea since it is on the sea and the technology is based on the nuclear sub and aircraft carrier power plants. http://www.gen4energy.com/
Good point, I've been looking at that. Also, the sea has extremely large available space (65 million square miles in the Pacific alone! By contrast, the US and China both have 1 million square miles.), so large solar cell plants are possible without the expense of land and land-taxes.
Then there's algae-based biodiesel(ABD)--most algaes of which actually come from and naturally grow in the sea. ABD costs are high right now, $18 to $33 a gallon or so:
"The production cost is high because of the energy required to circulate gases and other materials inside the photo bioreactors where the algae grow. It also takes energy to dry out the biomass..."
But I think tech will solve that in time. Combining ABD with solar-tech, ample land, and ample access to sea water could be a game changer.
I'm also looking at capturing compressed air from sea-waves and swells. Compressed air has an energy density comparable to gasoline.
acft:At this point Peter Thiel seems to have both the motivation and the finances to help these new projects get under way. I would say that once you have a solid business plan and you figure out the details to give him a ring. Angel; investors always make things go easier.
That would be huge if we interested him.
acft:Maybe you can call your island "Petoria" if he funds it XD
:D I want to call it 'Atlantis' :)
acft:Compelling Attendance As far as compelling someone to show up to court, I agree this can be a tricky issue. The danger is using force to compel innocent people to court.
As far as compelling someone to show up to court, I agree this can be a tricky issue. The danger is using force to compel innocent people to court.
That's why the grand jury was created, to make sure there's enough evidence to even support a charge right away. I share you concern, naturally. Many of the legal protections in the US Constitution would remain in place, including this one.
acft:My work around for this is to simply pay compensation if indeed the person is innocent.
I like that.
acft:With this compensation method in place, the harm of apprehending and basically kidnapping someone against their will, is compensated for by either the court or the party who paid for them to be apprehended.
Would have to be the party who levelled the charge, IMO.
acft:“Politicians” As for the "public servant" roles, I think there are benefits to both private competition and to volunteer positions. In both cases, there is no reason why the people involved can't be professionally trained on methods of thinking and weighing evidence. However, the volunteer system requires a sacrifice and I don’t think money hungry and power hungry people will be as likely to abuse the system. I also am a fan of subscription based services that enable market competition. I think that special care needs to be taken to prevent unscrupulous people from taking advantage of the top court’s monopoly powers, few as they may be. It is difficult to think of a test that could be used to screen such individuals out.
Hmm, probably the best way to do it would be to create an ad hoc supreme court on a case by case basis. If you don't know who's to serve, then it's much harder to buy them ahead of time. Candidates could be drawn from the judges within the various nearby jurisdictions.
Unlike our current system tho, the top court wouldn't have the ability to force their decision on the entire society, and there remains one final check against the Confederal governement and any supreme court getting out of hand and that is the ability to leave the confederal government itself and setup a new one, cloning the entire system and law structure except without the people who made the dumb decision.
I think a lot of city-state jurisdictions would be formed this way, where someone wants a law and the rest of the city doesn't, so he just clones the law system he had in that system, adds his own law, and builds a city-state along the borders of his current one, inviting those who agree to join him. Bam, new city-state. They would send a charter to the confederal gov, it would be registered, and they're done.
That's what we've never had in the US--the ability to separate ourselves from people making bad decisions and bad policies.
acft: “Public works” You said “He puts out a call to the community in which it would reside, almost like a kickstarter project. If enough people fund the bridge and like his design, they go ahead with it and the subscriptions are charged.” I like this idea a lot. This way no general funds are drained on the project and the items is more like a CO-OP. As long as the funding is voluntarily collected I think there would be little room to complain.
Not only that, but everyone who funded the project essentially becomes a shareholder in a new corporation and owns a piece of the bridge, which would be operated at a profit from then on. So it's an investment too. It's a way to organize community action in a completely individualistic, voluntary, and free market way.
I'm convinced that this idea especially is going to revolutionize political methodology and become the new means known as modern political methodology. Government is supposed to be a tool to help us live and achieve our goals, but instead has come to use us, as if we exist to serve it rather than the other way around.
In a political system predicated on individulism, this turn of events in impossible. The individual has the locus of control over what happens to him and that is the most sacred right within society, the right to choose your own way, true freedom.
acft:The Welfare scenario Now, my question is if someone who had a subscription for law services and lived in that jurisdiction didn’t want to pay for welfare would they have to move? Could they unsubscribe but keep their place? If they did have to move, this problem could be averted by saying that anyone who stands to have a new law or fee imposed on them is paid fair market value plus 20% and moving expenses to relocate or something.
I am creating a system where jurisdictional boundaries move rather than people having to move. If you don't like the laws of California, for instance, you have to physically leave the state. I want to say that legal boundaries are not sacred, that they should accomodate people rather than people accomodating the boundaries. Since this is a private property society, and since any legal jurisdiction (a city-state) is made up only of the property boundaries of those whom have subscribed to that city-state (ie, there is no commons, everything is owned privately), then your question of what happens when you leave a city-state is a very pertinent one, and I'll go over the issues.
It is the nature of law to have a monopoly on force in the area in which it exist, and generally, or at least historically, jurisdictions have had contiguous boundaries. Yet, the Vatican exists within Italy, so it clearly is not the nature of law or jurisdictions that a society cannot exist within its middle.
Initially, when I came up with this concept, I thought that if one was in a jurisdiction and seceded from it, that they should be given a reasonable amount of time to leave the jurisdiction and move their property to its boundaries.
Then, through speaking (arguing more like) with Autolykos, it seemed like there was no necessary or essential reason why one should have to leave. Why can't one start a jurisdiction in the center of another jurisdiction? Of course, that could become unwieldy.
I think I have the answer however: it should come down to how a jurisdiction sets itself up. To join a jurisdiction is to contractually bind yourself to the set of laws within it, until you object and leave it--a right constitutionally protected and unwaveable. So, when joining the jurisdiction, the contract would have a clause as to whether you can start a new jurisdiction within it, or saying that you agree to move yourself and your property to its boundaries if you secede so that the city-state may maintain contiguous boundaries.
Keeping the answer flexible and open seems to me the best way to solve this question. On the one hand, if we're all living on the water it's very easy to move your property. On the other hand some commercial ventures can't simply be moved. And if this system of governance moves to land-based societies at any point, they can't easily move either. In such cases, there's no option, they would have to form new city-states in place. It would be much harder if a city-state was completely fractured and split up. You would think that any one jurisdiction would have to be at least contiguous in total, meaning it can't be split up, there's has to be a connection between all areas somewhere.
This is all stuff that we can work out by actually doing it. So, I leave the answer open for now and we will see what people come up with in actual fact. I think most city-states would simply contract to keep contiguous boundaries.
acft:I guess another way to circumvent the problem of someone living in a jurisdiction, and then having people vote to change the terms of their subscription would be to make all votes unanimous in order to be enforced.
Essentially this is what happens, yes.
I have a whole vote system for intra-city-state votes I've worked out. Essentially it goes like this. If a law is proposed you have a couple options. You can ignore it completely, in which case it will never be applied to you and if the majority pass it you will be cut loose from that jurisdiction and can clone the legal system and start a new jurisdiction along with all the other people who also did not vote for that law and carry on as normal. I think that's awesome because everyone gets the law that they wanted! That means an end to political frustration!
When you don't like a law, you can register your citizen-veto against it, meaning that if it passes you are saying you will not accept it and will leave the jurisdiction. This may cause those who don't like the law to think twice and possibly change their minds.
This also means that there's no 'election day', since laws can be accepted or rejected at will. Every day is election day, and every day is a recall of a law you don't like, if you so choose.
No law can be forced on you, but jurisdictions can leave you if the majority like a law that you don't.
Now, I did have an idea. Suppose that the majority veto a law and it gets dropped. I think that politician should be remvoed from office. In the same way, we can have direct veto on other public decision-makers, kind of like instant recalls. And people who've been removed from office in this way can never hold office again in that jurisdiction.
acft:Other than that it seems it might create a situation like we have now where random people vote on something and my property taxes go up, but I can’t afford to move or do anything about it. I might be misunderstanding this part here.
Well again, on the water it's pretty cheap to move a floating structure of any size. Secondly, no one could raise property taxes on you against your will. But they could force you out of a jurisdiction where the majority do want higher fees for something and you don't, in which case you can clone the jurisdiction minus that law and keep on keeping on with the others who didn't like that law. Third, all of this can be avoided by joining a jurisdiction in line with your values in the first place.
When a jurisdiction starts up in the form of a city-state, it's charter will be a statement of values and purpose. And since it's so easy to start a jurisdiction, I expect people with like-minded value structures to join together and live together under those systems, leading to perhaps the most harmonious political climate that has ever existed.
So, if you're living in a city-state with say 100,000 members, a good size city for a new floating country, and it's charter and initial laws say things like we reject taxation, we will not do this, or that, or the other thing. It's unlikely that a majority would ever develop that would want to change this, because they can just join a jurisdiction next door that's in-line with their values. What are the chances that 51% of your city full of freedom-loving people will one day change their mind about taxation? Pretty low I think.
So, this kind of event might be a once or twice-in-a-lifetime kind of event over something pretty major, like an immediate crisis or something? In any case, it can be dealt with up-front with how the charter is written. It may be that most people won't agree to join a jurisdiction that would force them to move if they secede, and thus we will have many charters without movement-clauses. We shall see.
acft:Confed City-State Ok, that did clear it up for me. City-states make and enforce their own laws and only when these laws conflict with the constitution( which lists the basic rights the City-States cannot infringe upon) will the Confed step in.
Ok, that did clear it up for me. City-states make and enforce their own laws and only when these laws conflict with the constitution( which lists the basic rights the City-States cannot infringe upon) will the Confed step in.
Yes, exactly.
acft:Now, as a note, it seems like this would mean that the Confed would have to necessarily be stronger than the City-States OR have some method of rallying compliant City-States against non-compliant ones. Is this the case?
The confed would maintain a military, so it has that. It would also maintain something like an FBI in order to keep city-states in line and investigate allegations of law-breaking city-states. They would have jurisdiction throughout the nation. But they can only prosecute violations of basic rights and they can only prosecute city-states themselves.
acft:Funding the Con-fed – City States As I understand it, there is an optional fee of varying % used to insure transactions in addition to subscriptions people acquire for private protection under a code of law they choose. Is this the case for the City-States funding, the Con-Fed funding, or both?
The way I look at it, the Confed would use subscriptions as well. For instance, any military budget they'd have would be subscripted. It's also possible the confed could receive a percent of all the city-states' revenue, which would be constitutionally limited, and that way it would have automatic funding for a small military.
But I do want there to be a mechanism to beef up the military, but importantly, only if the people themselves feel threatened. Thus, I fall back on voluntary subscriptiosn which can be cancelled at any time.
It's also possible that individual city-states would fund military protection specifically for themselves to cater to local needs. Like, I could see floating communities off the coast of Indonesia funding a navy to protect them from piracy and the like. Does that answer your question?
acft:Law-“Making” I think the open source approach to law making, where anyone can suggest anything and if it makes sense it can be adopted or not, is good so long as the Confed is there to make sure mob-rule does not step on any constitutional boundaries. It is definitely better than the system we have now.
I think the open source approach to law making, where anyone can suggest anything and if it makes sense it can be adopted or not, is good so long as the Confed is there to make sure mob-rule does not step on any constitutional boundaries. It is definitely better than the system we have now.
Mob rule is what has taken over the US. In my view, the system of majority rule with minority rights has failed because minority rights are static. They've been chipped away at over and over again.
So, my system incorporates a way to essentially hit the reset button any time government begins encroaching on individual rights, by enshrining this right of individual secession, both micro-secession--meaning the ability to immediately remove yourself from a city-state for any reason, and macro-secession, meaning the ability of any individual OR any city-state to leave the confederal government and start whatever they want, freely, without fetters. I can easily imagine a scenario where the majority of city-states could secede from an aggressing confed and start their own confed, cloning the laws and starting over, leaving the former government with nothing, no land, no citizens, etc. But there's a good chance you wouldn't have an aggressing confed under the system I propose anyway, with no full time legislature to much things up.
acft:Without reps, there isn’t concentrated voting power on direct laws. Also, I would say that if anything, removing old laws should be made to be easier than adopting new ones so that laws and rules that are arcane can be gotten rid of easily whereas new rules are difficult to pass.
Yes! You're coming to these very quickly! Faster than I did I think :P I had thought of making new laws much harder than getting rid of old ones. That would solve sooooo many problems in our current system. In fact, I have thought of automatic-retirement schemes as well, like every law expiring within say 5-10 years. Keep any law-making body busy debating and deciding on which laws are actually worth keeping. Make passing a new law require a 2/3 vote and make getting rid of a law require only a 1/3 vote. In fact, split any law-making body into separate entities such that the minority can hold their own sessions and retire laws if they can muster a 1/3 vote.
But, the more I thought about those things I saw ways by which they could be easily gamed. Like, automatic retirement of law allows you to simply pass them again as blue sky laws in essence. A thousand laws could expire in one day and be re-passed as a package. It's near impossible to put any sort of constraint on that sort of thing. You can't force congress to pass laws individually or anything like that.
No, some other structural change was needed. So I came up with individual adoption and grouping people into jurisdictions along the lines of shared political principles.
But I'd be all for applying the 2/3 rule to new law adoption for jurisdictions before it triggers a question of who should leave the society (and, btw, some laws might require 100% adoption and some not, so it's not totally black and white on that issue).
acft:Have you thought about setting up an institute or some type of legal vehicle for your idea?
I have and am in planning stages on it. All I have right now is a blog that I've done a few writeups in detail on various issues, called the Floating Nation blog. Thanks for the encouragement :)
All in good time :) These concepts are still pretty new. I'd say they've really matured into what I laid before you today within the last six months (that after a lifetime of wrangling with the question of what's really wrong with our system and how can it possibly be fixed).
It is both a worthy endeavor and a necessary one. We live in a world where freedom is slowly dying, like a candle being starved of oxygen inside a container. Founding this new nation I consider my life's work.
I'm a writer, and the way all this came about is that I had the idea for a floating nation as part of a book idea. I'm a libertarian as well and so it was to be a libertarian system. So, I began researching floating structures, the legality of sea-borne nations, etc. But a funny thing happened, the more I researched it the less like fiction it appeared to be and I realized that not only is this thing completely doable, it needs to be done. So, I'm going to do it.
Stay tuned :)
You have a lot of good stuff here. Im going to take some time to absorb it.
Energy
I was interested in compressed air technology when I first heard it was being used in taxis. I don't know why this infrastructure has not been developed yet. The idea of having a clean way to store and transport energy that uses the air is ground breaking. It would replace... oh wait that’s probably why LOL
Compelling court attendance
I agree that making the party who leveled the charge pay in the case of innocence is a viable alternative to having the court pay it. Your method minimizes the chance of fallacious charges in the first place whereas the concept behind my way was that if the court has a financial incentive to make sure there is merit (witnesses, evidence etc.) to the charge before bothering to initiate force it would prevent a lot of cases that would go nowhere anyway. However, I assume there would be some standard of evidence necessary for a charge even to be considered unlike now where you can sue anyone for anything if you have the bread.
Politicians
I like the ad-hoc judge concept as it does make corruption mire problematic. Also, its good that you are building secession into the framework of your idea.
Jurisdictions
The concept of secession from seafaring jurisdiction might need some more development. I think the idea of making sure clauses cover this base from the start is the way to go. Forethought would prevent these types of conflicts form arising in most cases and the fact that we are even discussing this now is testament to that fact. Finding like minded people is indeed the most important step to take.
I wonder what options would be open to children, growing up in a jurisdiction that had laws they did not agree with, might have open to them. I mean, for many Americans, this is the problem. Their folks grew up in a place that had different moral codes and now we inherit it, but it is so hard to change the structure. I guess this just emphasizes why it must be much easier to nullify or revoke laws rather than instate them. Like you said, the answer would emerge with time.
Voting
Voting in the Modern era could be so much more efficient and secure. I was playing with a concept for secure voting that was very simple.
A person enters the booth, and they either present ID or eye or thumb scan. There are then 2 records of the vote made, one physical record in the machine in paper form and one PRINT OUT that the person takes with them. Now the printout has a randomly generated code on it that matches the machine vote. The code is going to be used internally and externally too activate an entry into a database.
We then set up a website available to everyone who voted. The people can then go home and enter their information onto multiple databases online that we share the results with. In theory, the manually entered codes that are on the physical printout should have the same results as the machine counted records. In this way there is essentially an official, and an independent count of the vote tally. Even if the officials miscount or mess up the vote, the codes on the vouchers can be entered into any number of online hosting services to see what the real vote tally was.
Its kind of like how you have a phone card and you can only use it if its activated.
Each voucher code is activated when a vote is cast and the vote is recorded and stored in a database and in physical form. People can’t just enter random codes. So online, all any voter had to do to verify their vote count is enter their voucher number and reference that data point in the database. It will have their biometric Data, so it can’t be forged, and also have a record of what they voted. As long as we made the database open after the vote, anyone could instantly run a site that could recount the vote based on voters just reentering their data and verifying the validity of their vote.
I like the idea of having a politician removed from office if they propose unpopular legislation, however, since anyone can put forth a law at any time, I don’t see where the politician would even fit in. ( as you can see, I don’t like politicians lol)
ConFed Military and FBI
OK, so the ConFed has a strong military and a FBI type force. Now you said it enforces the constitution against city states. Is it not plausible for companies to adopt rules that could violate basic rights and in this case could the city states or ConFed have jurisdiction? Or would this be a private property matter, where they can enforce whatever rules they want on their business property?
As for military funding, its seems like the method of funding might be dependent on the situation, which is reasonable. If a colony was in a high risks place it might have a different method of funding than a colony in the middle of nowhere. Indeed, defense itself in completely dependent on the threat, so it all gels well.
Law Making
The expiration of laws – this reminded me of the concept of Jubalee, where every x number of years all debts were forgiven to allow people to start again. Perhaps it can remove all laws except the Constitutional ones and force a revote BY THE PEOPLE to determine if they want to reinstate laws.
I had imagined a concept something like a reset vote, where if say 85% of the NON government employed people were tired of the government they could hold a reset vote. This vote would have all current reps removed and banned from public life for life. It seems harsh on the surface, but imagine if this were enacted today. You might actually get a quality new wave in and if not, at least they would be inexperienced and so ineffective for a little while.
As far as implementation good luck and I would be interested to see it implemented, especially any colonies further away from land where you have less of a chance of a State budging into your business.
acft:Energy I was interested in compressed air technology when I first heard it was being used in taxis. I don't know why this infrastructure has not been developed yet. The idea of having a clean way to store and transport energy that uses the air is ground breaking. It would replace... oh wait that’s probably why LOL
For moving around a watery city, compressed air engines would be ideal for water-taxis and the like.
One thing I haven't talked about is a wave-wall around the city, which it needs to tame swells. This wave-wall can also be a compressed-air harvestor. It's hard to describe in print, but I found a design for a wave lense capable of guiding waves around any structure, via a series of square pylons, and it's this design I want to use to tame the swells. Behind the wave-wall would be relatively calm water, such as that inside a harbor. A byproduct of it could be putting solar cells on the tops of these, and the wave the wave-wall works, it collides waves together in process of lensing them around the city, thus it can harvest compressed air out of these unnaturally large swells created in it. Still investigating this, but it would be fantastic to have wave energy providing relativley cheap energy for us.
acft:Compelling court attendance I agree that making the party who leveled the charge pay in the case of innocence is a viable alternative to having the court pay it. Your method minimizes the chance of fallacious charges in the first place whereas the concept behind my way was that if the court has a financial incentive to make sure there is merit (witnesses, evidence etc.) to the charge before bothering to initiate force it would prevent a lot of cases that would go nowhere anyway. However, I assume there would be some standard of evidence necessary for a charge even to be considered unlike now where you can sue anyone for anything if you have the bread.
Why don't we extend the concept of a grand-jury to civil cases? Right now, in the US, the grand jury system doesn't exist for civil cases. They would quickly determine while speaking to the complaining party if there's anything to the suit, reviewing the complainant's evidence and okay a trial if there's something to it, thus avoiding frivolous lawsuits before involving the defendant.
acft:Politicians I like the ad-hoc judge concept as it does make corruption mire problematic. Also, its good that you are building secession into the framework of your idea.
Secession is the heart of it. You're not free if you can't walk away. And if you can walk away from a sick system, it will crash on its own. Our current US system is completely ill, but it only continues to work because of what I call 'citizen capture'--which is to say that the people who would love to leave and join a free society ultimately have nowhere else to go, so they're forced to bear the burdens others decide to place upon them. It's simply wrong.
acft:Jurisdictions The concept of secession from seafaring jurisdiction might need some more development. I think the idea of making sure clauses cover this base from the start is the way to go. Forethought would prevent these types of conflicts form arising in most cases and the fact that we are even discussing this now is testament to that fact. Finding like minded people is indeed the most important step to take.
Certainly, and it's just as important to leave certain things open as it is to lock down other things, and wherever I find myself fuzzy my tendency is to leave it open to individual jurisdictions to decide until I find a principled reason why things should be done one way or the other.
Let me lay before you the derivation of the right of secession. It derives from the right of free association. It is a new political right that I intend to promot as a solution to our current ills. Everyone has the right to freely associate with whom they will, and one corollary to that right is the right to not associate with whom you would not like to.
The US system of taking from peter to pay paul and all the sick redistributionist policies rely on citizen capture and the inability to escape the aggression of those whom lay laws upon us against our will.
To institute this new right is to forever relegate redistributionist Bismarckian politics to the dustbin of history and thrust the primacy of individual decisionin political matters to the forefront.
acft: I wonder what options would be open to children, growing up in a jurisdiction that had laws they did not agree with, might have open to them. I mean, for many Americans, this is the problem. Their folks grew up in a place that had different moral codes and now we inherit it, but it is so hard to change the structure. I guess this just emphasizes why it must be much easier to nullify or revoke laws rather than instate them. Like you said, the answer would emerge with time.
I actually have a good answer for this, I believe.
First, we view children as free-decision making human beings whom are not yet mature enough to make decisions for themselves, so we would say that their parents hold them in trust, in essence a living-fiduciary responsibility. Parents can make decisions for them as long as they don't aggress against them (naturally).
Now, the parents, ostensibly a married couple, would likely be of the same jurisdiction (in most cases by far), and would raise their children in that same value structure and thus the same jurisdiction.
The question then arises at what point do the kids become self-responsible and how do we handle that?
The answer is that there will not be some arbitrary age, such as in the US which uses 18. Rather we need to use an obejctive measure of when a child becomes an adult. And that measure will be when the child is able to support-themselves fully, financially and otherwise. They've moved out on their own and are self-supportive. At that point, we can reasonably say they've taken on adult-responsibility for themselves, they've taken the keys to their own life. They now are removed from their parents jurisdiction actively and have no jurisdiction and must actively choose which jurisdiction they would like to live in.
This point of actively removing them and allowing, in fact demanding, a free positive choice is to prevent jurisdictions from simply assuming citizens will continue within it. Since this is a voluntaryist nation, every citizen must actively choose to join the jurisdiction they live in. We cannot assume any child will choose to live where they've grown up, that they just inherit a jurisdiction, such as US cities do. Such would be an aggression and removes the idea of voluntaryism and human choice.
Some kids that point might be ager 13, some it might be in their 20's, who knows, but for everyone that point comes.
acft:Voting Voting in the Modern era could be so much more efficient and secure. I was playing with a concept for secure voting that was very simple. A person enters the booth, and they either present ID or eye or thumb scan. There are then 2 records of the vote made, one physical record in the machine in paper form and one PRINT OUT that the person takes with them. Now the printout has a randomly generated code on it that matches the machine vote. The code is going to be used internally and externally too activate an entry into a database. We then set up a website available to everyone who voted. The people can then go home and enter their information onto multiple databases online that we share the results with. In theory, the manually entered codes that are on the physical printout should have the same results as the machine counted records. In this way there is essentially an official, and an independent count of the vote tally. Even if the officials miscount or mess up the vote, the codes on the vouchers can be entered into any number of online hosting services to see what the real vote tally was. Its kind of like how you have a phone card and you can only use it if its activated. Each voucher code is activated when a vote is cast and the vote is recorded and stored in a database and in physical form. People can’t just enter random codes. So online, all any voter had to do to verify their vote count is enter their voucher number and reference that data point in the database. It will have their biometric Data, so it can’t be forged, and also have a record of what they voted. As long as we made the database open after the vote, anyone could instantly run a site that could recount the vote based on voters just reentering their data and verifying the validity of their vote.
Ah, I like that :) I've thought about votes done with hashing algorithms, and rather than register a vote you'd log a hash and then everyone would reveal their private key at the same point at which point you'd find out who voted for what en masse, and this would be particularly difficult to fake :P
Regardless, there's so many ways to game the voting system--no one really can check to make sure all the votes are legit, and so the greatest protection against vote stealing we could ever have is to place the locus of control with the individual and make sure a right to micro-secession remains in place. Stealing an election won't do anyone any good if all the citizens can simply walk away from a bad politicians by cloning the jurisdiction and building a new one next door :P
I haven't talked about it much, but a lot of these concepts virtually require the internet as an enabling techology. Like, the idea of cloning the laws structure--that's a term taken right from Git-hub, where one can clone a set of programming code, fork it, and make your own changes. This idea of algorithmic law and treating law as code is very interesting to me :)
acft:I like the idea of having a politician removed from office if they propose unpopular legislation, however, since anyone can put forth a law at any time, I don’t see where the politician would even fit in. ( as you can see, I don’t like politicians lol)
True :) It's just an idea I'd had and liked, but ultimately it may not even be necessary given the other more reliable ways of escaping bad law-making such as the threat of secession :) It could be something that the US could adopt later as a step towards a system of this type, a personal veto and removing unpopular politicians not through yearly elections but through instant recalls to kick them out of office.
acft:ConFed Military and FBI OK, so the ConFed has a strong military and a FBI type force. Now you said it enforces the constitution against city states. Is it not plausible for companies to adopt rules that could violate basic rights and in this case could the city states or ConFed have jurisdiction? Or would this be a private property matter, where they can enforce whatever rules they want on their business property?
Since the confed's main role is to keep the city-states honest, they would leave prosecution of a company to the city-states. Though, if a city-state were blatantly allowing a company to violate basic rights, then it would itself be prosecuted by the confed and then the company's protection is gone too.
One area where anarchist libertarians have completely failed to provide any legitimate solutions is the situation where an aggressor has captured some victims and holds them in a state of slavery or the like. The overpowered have no power to seek outside help or notify anyone. We need in this instance a legal entity capable of investigating things that it is not personally involved in, such as a general police power. Someone whose job it is to enforce basic rights on a societal basis. The confed and the FBI would take care of this and ensure that we don't have some aggressor cities with a weird charter holding women and children as slaves or w/e.
To return to your question, since this is a contractual voluntaryist society, simply existing within the confines of the Confed's territory means that everyone inside has agreed to abide by those basic rights constitutionally protected. So, a business would be expected to abide by at least those basic rights if they want to remain within society and not make a charter violating them. We would not put up with anyone who thinks they could rape anyone who comes on their territory just because it is their own private property. There is a line there. Yes you can do what you want with your property, but other people are not your property and you must abide by basic rights.
It will be important to make sure those basic rights are particularly well defined, but I don't foresee that being a big issue. We've got a pretty good handle on basic rights already, except that I'm adding the one basic rights of political-secession.
acft: As for military funding, its seems like the method of funding might be dependent on the situation, which is reasonable. If a colony was in a high risks place it might have a different method of funding than a colony in the middle of nowhere. Indeed, defense itself in completely dependent on the threat, so it all gels well.
I think it prudent to leave it open like that. This should be a flexible society with as much freedom as possible :) Back in the day, the Venetians had their own military, as did several other city-states. And why should we ask a safe city in the depths of a nation to pay for the military needs of those choosing to risk their lives to do business on a frontier?
But ultimately, if a city-state is unable to handle a local problem with another nation-state or large-scale threats on another nature, I think everyone would rally to them and agree that the confed should come to their rescue, and that the nation would choose to finance a military venture to defend those being aggressed against.
acft:Law Making The expiration of laws – this reminded me of the concept of Jubalee, where every x number of years all debts were forgiven to allow people to start again. Perhaps it can remove all laws except the Constitutional ones and force a revote BY THE PEOPLE to determine if they want to reinstate laws.
Yes, it was exactly the idea of Jubilee that inspired that concept :) It might be extremely healthy for a society to go back to some concept of Jubilee, a 50 year reset on all contracts and laws. I'll have to think about that, but my sense is that it would be better written into the charters of city-states than forced constitutionally, since it strikes me as more of a good thing to have than an essential feature, and this is an essentialist state :)
acft:I had imagined a concept something like a reset vote, where if say 85% of the NON government employed people were tired of the government they could hold a reset vote. This vote would have all current reps removed and banned from public life for life.
Probably would be good put into a local charter :)
acft:It seems harsh on the surface, but imagine if this were enacted today. You might actually get a quality new wave in and if not, at least they would be inexperienced and so ineffective for a little while. As far as implementation good luck and I would be interested to see it implemented, especially any colonies further away from land where you have less of a chance of a State budging into your business.
I'm looking at a couple seamounts off the California coast--which happens to be particularly suited to this concept, having very small eddy-currents that travel past the shore.
Initially I'll start just into international waters, some 14 miles off the coast. But eventually we'll be forced into "true" international waters somewhere about 140 miles out. There's also a couple seamounts near Hawaii that may make good candidates to anchor to.
After that, after showing it a viable way to live, after putting in place a functioning society and proving it works, sky's the limits :)
I'm taking your words to heart, thinking and looking into ways to get this concept some more exposure when the timing is right. Probably early next year I can get a dedicated website up, start promoting it further, and work on a business plan to take it full time :)
I estimate that building a factory or a house on a floating structure wouldn't cost more than creating a regular house, especially with the cost of housing and land in California! Especially waterfront property!
Important for me is to continue working on the engineering aspects of interlocking floating structures so I can be on top of that when time comes to make the first large-scale prototype, and to start producing the documents needed to get that dedicated website ready to unveil :)
These exchanges are really great too because you can help me find and consider aspects and challenges I may have missed and need to think about and find solutions for. But I've now found enough solutions during the past year or so that I think the system is nearly mature enough for me to write up the first Individualist Constitution, which will enshrine the principles necessary to underlie the first Confed, including the basic rights and protections the confed will enforce.
Immediately when this nation gets going, I want to found at least two more Confeds alongside it, so that people don't get stuck on the idea of there being only one and that it's somehow a sin to leave one confed and make another. Ultimately I can see several confeds based in various oceans, and one day some in space or on other planets.
The ideas we're talking about are revolutionary, and they're the only revolutionary ideas in the world right now, because the true revolution is not to take power from one group and give it to another--history is full of that, that changes nothing, and that is all the left, the socialists and the like, are trying to do. That is a mere return to barbarism. The true revolution is to demolish the concept that anyone controls you but yourself, to give power to the individual and demolish the socialist ethic that underpins all modern nation-states, including the US, enshrined within the idea of majority rule.
No majority rule. Individual rule. And the individual that you rule is yourself and no one else. The result is true freedom. That is the truth about human nature. You control yourself, you can never control another, no one can control you, and it would be immoral to try.
Atlantis will be the first nation-state to institute the ethic of the non-aggression principle within a political system, for the majority vote is indeed an aggression on those who vote against a law that ends up forced on them anyway.
Majority rule was a huge improvement over the rule of princes and kings whom ruled by whim with absolute power. But we will offer the world an even greater improvement: true freedom.
On children
I would say that one of, if not the most important area of concern in a new society would be how children are treated legally.
I believe this for several reasons.
First, obviously, most people are strongly emotionally attached to their children. So much so that they will quickly throw their principles under the bus if the right person comes along and says it is “for the children”
Secondly, Government are notorious for taking issues that people care about deeply and manipulating them to their own ends. Whether it is the environment, the poor, the sick, the elderly, or the children, any room they have to maneuver will be exploited.
Now you raised an important philosophical question that has to be addressed in any system, namely.
‘The question then arises at what point do the kids become self-responsible and how do we handle that?’
I have a whole essay on this that I might release some day but here are some thoughts on this.
I like to take the approach of taking the hardest problems on first and so if one can solve those first
One of the main issues that cause people to object to living in a free society is the fear of child exploitation and slavery, namely child porn and child sex. I devoted a lot of time to considering this issue and I tried to reason out what criteria one should consider when determining if a child’s or ‘Person’s consent can be taken seriously.
Many reasons are given as to why there is an age of consent and contract enforcement
Let’s call Consent - the ability to demonstrate understanding of a proposition and therefore agree or not agree.
One is: Children are unable to understand the consequences of their actions.
Now, assuming this is the case I asked myself, are there not ‘adults’ who fails to see the consequences of their actions. We allow adults to do things that lead to their own physical and emotional detriment all the time anywhere from drunken regret to SD’s and unwanted children. Therefore, the result of an interaction cannot be considered if we are talking about ‘consent’. To put it another way, whether or not someone is consenting to something at the time they are doing it is worthy of consideration. If someone consents to euthanasia, for example, the end result is death and they certainly can’t change their mind afterward.
Another reason given is that children are not smart enough to understand the concept of consent. This is certainly the case up to the age where the child can speak fluently and is beginning to master language.
A child, for example, can choose what they like to eat, where they want to go, whether or not they want to go to sleep or not, etc. A child can ask for things, or reject things.
Apply this standard to adults: There are high functioning mentally handicapped individuals who may or may not understand the concept of consent and yet are allowed to engage in whatever activities they like.
Now just because something is a certain way now does not make it right, perhaps high functioning mentally challenged people shouldn’t be able to have lovers, I donno.
The biological perspective:
Human beings reach physical sexual maturity. This is called puberty and is a de facto signal for when the human body is ready for sexual activity. Based on the readings I have done on this issue on different boards from time to time, a lot of people agree that puberty is a decent benchmark.
Indeed, any voluntary society would rest on the cornerstone of consent, where the criminality of something is determined by consent. For example, someone can have their house broken into voluntarily(locksmith) , someone can have something taken from their house voluntarily( a runner, or allowing someone to borrow something), someone can be killed voluntarily (assisted suicide), someone can be assaulted and battered voluntarily ( Masochism)
Whereas all of these actions without the consent of the person or the owner of property being acted upon would be considered criminal
Therefore it would seem that the most important factor is first, determining whether or not the person being acted upon has the capacity to understand language and if so, whether or not they gave their free, un coerced consent. As you said, the age of this ability is different for different people.
On the face of it, this might lead to situations some might find morally detestable, however, history shows up females being married off at ages of 9, and sometimes even younger. Even though I personally disagree with it, where would I get the authority to stop it if the kid was agreeing with all the terms. (besides the contract or charter of coarse)
One of the determining factors you presented was the child being able to move out and/or support themselves fully. While support of oneself can be seen as a signal of this, I have personally met and know grown people living at home who cannot support themselves.
Of coarse, since the society is contractual, people can determine whatever they see fit as a legal age for consent or for contract enforcement, etc. This is all just food for thought.
It just seems so easy for some politician to go “WE need to stop these people form doing x. Look, those 14 year olds don’t know what they are getting into! We need to (invade, tax, annex, whatever) in order to stop this madnesss!!!111111 one one” without the whole society being tolerant of other people’s choices.
Slavery
Similar to the child issue, all of it can be taken care of with a contract outlining exactly how people are to be treated, it is not too difficult to put an anti-slavery clause in the constitution of a given Confed thus enabling them to investigate such matters.
However, another philosophical quandary: Can someone sell themselves into slavery? This example is very easy to imagine without any arcane scenarios. A rich person is approached by someone who is very poor. This someone agrees to be his slave for 10 years if he gives them the money they need to do x, y z, usually saved a loved one from some dire illness. Is the contract enforceable? Furthermore, what if it’s a sexual contract and they refuse. Would this be a case of legally permissible rape?
I know all of this is off topic, but the answer to these questions not only test the flexibility and viability of a legal system, but it also gets people thinking about what kind of society they want to live in.
Sea Mounts
States jealously guard their islands, even the small or mostly submerged ones. I don’t know if they would be open to allowing you to buy one or if a colony of volunteerists would have the heart to take one lol.
Still though, there has got to be some viable real estate out there.
Forgive me for paraphrasing your posts here, lots of prelim reasoning:
acft:On children Now you raised an important philosophical question that has to be addressed in any system, namely. ‘The question then arises at what point do the kids become self-responsible and how do we handle that?’ One of the main issues that cause people to object to living in a free society is the fear of child exploitation and slavery, namely child porn and child sex. I devoted a lot of time to considering this issue and I tried to reason out what criteria one should consider when determining if a child’s or ‘Person’s consent can be taken seriously. Many reasons are given as to why there is an age of consent and contract enforcement Let’s call Consent - the ability to demonstrate understanding of a proposition and therefore agree or not agree. One is: Children are unable to understand the consequences of their actions.
Many reasons are given as to why there is an age of consent and contract enforcement Let’s call Consent - the ability to demonstrate understanding of a proposition and therefore agree or not agree.
K, I'm with you so far.
acft:Now, assuming this is the case I asked myself, are there not ‘adults’ who fails to see the consequences of their actions. We allow adults to do things that lead to their own physical and emotional detriment all the time anywhere from drunken regret to SD’s and unwanted children. Therefore, the result of an interaction cannot be considered if we are talking about ‘consent’... Another reason given is that children are not smart enough to understand the concept of consent. This is certainly the case up to the age where the child can speak fluently and is beginning to master language. A child, for example, can choose what they like to eat, where they want to go, whether or not they want to go to sleep or not, etc. A child can ask for things, or reject things. The biological perspective: Human beings reach physical sexual maturity. This is called puberty and is a de facto signal for when the human body is ready for sexual activity. Based on the readings I have done on this issue on different boards from time to time, a lot of people agree that puberty is a decent benchmark.
Sure, so should we then have some sort of minimum age? Still, puberty is not equivalent across bloodlines, some reaching it early and some comparatively late.
acft:Indeed, any voluntary society would rest on the cornerstone of consent, where the criminality of something is determined by consent.
Certainly.
acft:...Therefore it would seem that the most important factor is first, determining whether or not the person being acted upon has the capacity to understand language and if so, whether or not they gave their free, un coerced consent. As you said, the age of this ability is different for different people. On the face of it, this might lead to situations some might find morally detestable, however, history shows up females being married off at ages of 9, and sometimes even younger. Even though I personally disagree with it, where would I get the authority to stop it if the kid was agreeing with all the terms. (besides the contract or charter of coarse)
Perhaps there should be some capacity for challenging consent in edge cases, or that of the presumption of parents' stewardship over kids. A kid could perhaps sue a parent to sever their parents ability to make decisions over them. We have this now but it's rare. Perhaps we could tie several objective aspects together: ability to understand the consequences of consent, passage into puberty, and financial self-support. These three things would indicate a being capable of making decisions for themselves.
acft:One of the determining factors you presented was the child being able to move out and/or support themselves fully... Of course, since the society is contractual, people can determine whatever they see fit as a legal age for consent or for contract enforcement, etc. This is all just food for thought.
Of course, since the society is contractual, people can determine whatever they see fit as a legal age for consent or for contract enforcement, etc. This is all just food for thought.
It might well be adviseable to allow city-states to decide some aspect here. But certainly the idea that consent must be involved is inviolable. I sincerely doubt most kids married off at age 9 in tribal societies are consenting at all.
Since any marriage in this society would be contractual (so unlike now!), forming a marriage against someone's consent would invalidate the contract, and you'd have remedy there via legal action.
acft:It just seems so easy for some politician to go “WE need to stop these people form doing x. Look, those 14 year olds don’t know what they are getting into! We need to (invade, tax, annex, whatever) in order to stop this madnesss!!!111111 one one” without the whole society being tolerant of other people’s choices.
True enough, but if they did so and interviewed the 14 yo's and they all wanted to stay what could you really do.
I think it's important in such cases that people who might be victims be offered a chance to walk away from what appears to be an abusive situation.
Especially since a society like this wouldn't make predeterminations about what's ethical in terms of marriage. You'd have multiple-partner marriages I'm sure, 'cause there's people crazy enough to do that out there :P As for divorce, it would be part of the marriage contract and agreed upon in advance, without state intervention, but enforceable as a contract.
What if the marriage contract did not provide for divorce or stated there would be no possibility of divorce? I think in such cases the courts would decide what was reasonable, some sort of fall-back rational probably similar to what the current marriage laws are in the US, with a split of goods and the like. As for a marriage contract the prohibited divorce, one could treat it as a situation where someone tried to contract to make themselves a slave, it would be unenforceable.
Which is a rather good segue to:
acft:Slavery Similar to the child issue, all of it can be taken care of with a contract outlining exactly how people are to be treated, it is not too difficult to put an anti-slavery clause in the constitution of a given Confed thus enabling them to investigate such matters.
Yes, that will be in there.
acft: However, another philosophical quandary: Can someone sell themselves into slavery? This example is very easy to imagine without any arcane scenarios. A rich person is approached by someone who is very poor. This someone agrees to be his slave for 10 years if he gives them the money they need to do x, y z, usually saved a loved one from some dire illness. Is the contract enforceable? Furthermore, what if it’s a sexual contract and they refuse. Would this be a case of legally permissible rape?
If we consider rights inalienable, and I do, then it is not possible to sell onesself into slavery or be ethically forced to hold to a sexual contract. You cannot contract with someone to let them murder you because agreeing to let someone murder you becomes assissted suicide :P Similarly, slavery is innately against a person's will and contracting for slavery would mean it was voluntary. Rape without force is no longer rape, etc. You could contract to exchange your services to someone for an up-front payment, or for permanent room and board, but if you broke the contract and didn't want to be a slave anymore their only recourse would be a property claim: getting the payment back or withholding from you room and board, which would not then be a problem at all as you clearly intend to leave anyway. They could no compulse service.
If you can make a contract you clearly have a right to break it, and recourse is drawn rationally from there. But to contract to have a slave in actuality, one must use aggression to prevent them from breaking the contract, which would clearly be against the idea of a voluntary society which is this individualistic society's most sacred principle. You could sell yourself as a slave only if you voluntarily acted as a slave from then on and chose not to break off the master/slave relationship.
acft:I know all of this is off topic, but the answer to these questions not only test the flexibility and viability of a legal system, but it also gets people thinking about what kind of society they want to live in.
:) I appreciate the challenges. To form a new society requires a breadth of considerations such as this.
acft:Sea Mounts States jealously guard their islands, even the small or mostly submerged ones. I don’t know if they would be open to allowing you to buy one or if a colony of volunteerists would have the heart to take one lol. Still though, there has got to be some viable real estate out there.
If it has no emerged into air it's not considered real estate :) A seamount is a term for a near-island, thus they make good anchoring spots where you're not sitting in miles of deepwater.
I've researched a couple viable seamounts off the California and Mexican coasts, some with as little as 1500 feet of water to the surface.
The seamounts off the Hawaiian coast seem to be protected legally, true enough.
Ultimately all states consider anything within IIRC 225 miles of their coast as an 'exclusive economic zone' and we would probably have to eventually move out to beyond that boundary. But anchoring anywhere I consider a temporary measure for the early days.
Here's a mesmerizing look at the ocean's currents over time, globally. This shows current change over a two year period. What you'll see are permanent to semi-permanent ocean gyres. If you were to plop a city in the center of a gyre, in theory the whirlpool-gyre would keep the structure centered with minimal force needed to stabilize it.
Look at all the gyres there are worldwide; you could drop a floating city in each one, possibly many cities side by side. Even the gyres that move, you could simply gyre-hop every year or so as needed.
Also, notice the west coast of the US is relatively free of major gyre action, making it a good incubator and test-case for this sort of experiment.
Ultimately, let's say we have a 10 or 20 square mile floating structure composed of several city-states going in a single location. It would need to have locomotive ability. It could do this with several giant azimuth thrusters powered any number of ways from nuclear, solar, biodiesel, wind-power, compressed air, even diesel fuel, or with distributed clusters of azimuth thrusters and tugboats. If each constituent part of the floating structure had an azimuth, then then could simply move via coordination.
It would be possible for pieces to break off the structure and go join other clusters across the sea. So, the whole thing being modular makes it especially flexible.
Good stuff here, I will respond to this soon. Check out 'The solution' post about the "enclave method" which is basically what we have been talking about.
Anome said:
"If we consider rights inalienable, and I do, then it is not possible to sell onesself into slavery or be ethically forced to hold to a sexual contract. You cannot contract with someone to let them murder you because agreeing to let someone murder you becomes assissted suicide :P Similarly, slavery is innately against a person's will and contracting for slavery would mean it was voluntary. Rape without force is no longer rape, etc. You could contract to exchange your services to someone for an up-front payment, or for permanent room and board, but if you broke the contract and didn't want to be a slave anymore their only recourse would be a property claim: getting the payment back or withholding from you room and board, which would not then be a problem at all as you clearly intend to leave anyway. They could no compulse service."
Hmmm so similar to how contracts are handled today, we do not compel delivery, but demand compensation for a failure to fulfill the contract. So it seems that it is impossible for one to contract to force themselves to do something in the future. I suppose this is a limit on contracting, where contracts are limited by the basic rights you laid out in the charter. Acceptable.
Of coarse, if the person can't pay, would you support forced labor of some sort, or perhaps just ostricism?
Would a contract enforcement not be in reaction to a break of contract, where certain actions are triggered? I say this because we already established that using coercion, say to compel attendance in a court, is allowed if we have evidence of a serious crime.
"Here's a mesmerizing look at the ocean's currents over time, globally. This shows current change over a two year period. What you'll see are permanent to semi-permanent ocean gyres. If you were to plop a city in the center of a gyre, in theory the whirlpool-gyre would keep the structure centered with minimal force needed to stabilize it."
This was indeed truly mesmerizing. All of those currents are caused by the moon according to current theory, correct? Putting the cities in the center does indeed seem like a good idea, btw. Have you factorred in the trade lanes on the sea? I would think commercial shipping might limit where you can go as well.
acft: Of course, if the person can't pay, would you support forced labor of some sort, or perhaps just ostricism?
Of course, if the person can't pay, would you support forced labor of some sort, or perhaps just ostricism?
No, I'd support the usual solutions today: attaching property or wages to pay a debt. And of course I'd allow the jubilee idea of bankruptcy, as I think most would. Forced labor I'd equate to slavery. The ostracism solution I don't think would be tenable in a large scale society--but it would work well enough in small ones below say 2,000 members or so. And in order to attach property or wages, you'd need a court with legal force to compel that sort of thing. Same thing with bankruptcy, you need a court capable of wiping out legal debts and calling a reset.
acft: Would a contract enforcement not be in reaction to a break of contract, where certain actions are triggered? I say this because we already established that using coercion, say to compel attendance in a court, is allowed if we have evidence of a serious crime.
Not sure I understand your meaning here, can you restate it?
Even in today's world some companies will sue for specific fulfillment of a contract's terms, in cases where fulfilling the contract is the only reasonable remedy, I just don't think that could ever be a reasonable remedy for something like a slavery contract. Such is rarer, and usually involves delivery of unique goods and the like.
acft:This was indeed truly mesmerizing. All of those currents are caused by the moon according to current theory, correct? Putting the cities in the center does indeed seem like a good idea, btw.
Not just the moon, but also temperature gradients, wind, spin of the earth--it's a complex system. If you consider the tides, then a lot of the movement would be the tides plus the ocean-floor geometry driving movement. One of the most interesting things in that visualization is the massive flow of water back and forth from the middle of Africa to America. I used to wonder why that was the preferred route to America. Ships discovered this jet-stream to America long ago. And whales and sharks use them just the same to get around with minimal energy.
acft:Have you factorred in the trade lanes on the sea? I would think commercial shipping might limit where you can go as well.
Certainly. What I plan to create is something like a aircraft control system, on the scale of an ocean. People use GPS to track their boats these days, track where they are. They would be able to plug into this system and see where they and everyone else is, and use it to automatically steer and the like.
Shipping lanes would become areas people would be encouraged to stay out of and leave alone, as they are essentially common areas much like a road of old. I think in the near future we'll have computers steering all our boats, not just the giant cargo ones, and some kind of open system like this will be necessary.
There's more reasons for it though. One of the reasons why no one has tried to own parts of the ocean as if it were real estate is because it's very difficult to mark where your property ends and another's begins.
However, with the advent of GPS, this is no longer a problem, though we do have to begin marking out property boundaries in three dimensions rather than two, because of the nature of the ocean. Most people wouldn't need more than 50 feet below the surface of the ocean, so you could both own water at the surface and land under the sea.
And if we ever colonize space, a robust system of three-dimensional property boundaries will be needed to own sections of space, and this will be a prelude to that.
So this aircraft-control-like system would allow everyone to know where everyone else's boat is, while they want to use it and want to be seen on it (all voluntary still), and allow boaters to coordinate their movements. This should work to eliminate collisions and accidents as much as possible.
And also, if we did have an actual floating city out there, how would you find it? You'd find it by the combination of two things: an address that doesn't change plus their constantly changing GPS coordinates--which means you'd look up the current GPS coords via an internet address.
Apart from simply owning specific sections of water, I think people might own relative sections as well, meaning that they could own a specific space relative to the center of a city that's always moving. This would be a lot cheaper than actually owning a non-moving section of water specifically, I would think.
So, there's a bunch of things in there that really have only become possible in the last few decades, and would still be tough to implement even today. How do you get mail to a floating house that is nothing but a GPS coordinate? Perhaps using a quadcopter or a robotically-driven submarine.
I have thought of things like emergency services being provided by air or by submarine, because it's much faster to cut across a city than to maneuver in its streets.
Anenome said"
"Not sure I understand your meaning here, can you restate it?
Even in today's world some companies will sue for specific fulfillment of a contract's terms, in cases where fulfilling the contract is the only reasonable remedy, I just don't think that could ever be a reasonable remedy for something like a slavery contract. Such is rarer, and usually involves delivery of unique goods and the like."
Yeah... let me try to clarify.
We can coerce people to do actions because of a warrant, say to force someone to appear in court.
Therefore, the precedent is set that people can be forced to do something that they agreed and contracted to do. (In this case, by joining the community they signed the charter and in the charter it said 'if there is evidence suggesting you did a crime you can be compelled to go to court'"
And so,
Since the charter is essentially a contract that is explicitly entered into, why can't force be used to compel the conditions of other contracts?
Because, force or coercion is already used to compel the charter contract. Making someone go to court is a forced action. Taking someone's wages is confiscating the fruits of someone’s labor. I am in agreement that as the punishment for a crime or a condition for restitution it's valid.
But since it is ok to force them to do those labor tasks, (give up their salary or a portion of it and go to court) why wouldn't it be ok to force them to obey the contract, philosophically. Now, agreed, this could be a preference issue, where the people prefer to only enforce certain contractual agreements and not others. However, philosophically, forcing someone to go to court because they signed a contract that authorized compelling court attendance, or forcing someone to work and give up what they earned because they signed a contract that said wages can be garnished, could be akin to forcing some prostitute to have sex with someone who signed over their house to her as long as the contract stated the service could be taken, as an asinine example.
All they would need is a clause that said “in the event you receive consideration and refuse to perform said services you authorize me to compel the performance of said services by force" signed and witnessed.
Sex with a certain individual can be argued to very extremely unique.
I would imagine that if such a contract were to try to be enforced, the Confed might step in. This is not meant as a serious challenge to the idea, but a mental exercise.
"They would be able to plug into this system and see where they and everyone else is, and use it to automatically steer and the like.
Shipping lanes would become areas people would be encouraged to stay out of and leave alone, as they are essentially common areas much like a road of old. I think in the near future we'll have computers steering all our boats, not just the giant cargo ones, and some kind of open system like this will be necessary."
I am pretty sure they already use autopilot programs like this. The ships and aircraft just plot a course and let the computer to the rest, only getting manual control if there is a problem.
There would probably be mature AI technology by the like this
You could have the islands or boats monitor their own position relative to other nodes.
"So, there's a bunch of things in there that really have only become possible in the last few decades, and would still be tough to implement even today. How do you get mail to a floating house that is nothing but a GPS coordinate? Perhaps using a quadcopter or a robotically-driven submarine."
I had an idea for a competitor to the US mail system. We already have vehicles that go to most parts of the country, they are called trucks. Trucking delivers everything in this country to everywhere, and so if someone needed mail, they could find a trucker who needed extra cash, give him a bundle, and he could droop it off at a predetermined location for it to be distributed since he’s already headed that way. The same holds true with shipping lanes. As long as you have a node near a shipping lane a ship going from say US to Europe will pass by and can be give and container or two with mail and as long as you can dock as sea and get it or send a cargo shopper. You could pay the ship owner for the service and have your mail on the vessel waiting to be airlifted to the colony.