Despite my deep respect for Ron Paul and others who have tried to reform the system from within, I have now become deeply disillusioned with thinking that the US government will ever be knocked down even a peg. However this creates a dilemma for me because I do not see how a free society can move forward any other way. I'm completely at a loss of imagination regarding this.
What could I be doing to make Libertopia a reality?
The problem with that is that my ideal start location, off the coast of california, would be eliminated were I to follow that suggestion. Geography and location is ever important. I start it off the coast of Africa or Madagascar and nothing will happen. No reason to go there or anything. Beyond that, islands are stupidly expensive, even small ones, and even if you buy them the host country doesn't typically give you complete sovereignty, it's conditional.
For the cost of any typical small island I could duplicate it's land area in floating structures. I can understand that you don't have the particulars in mind and it's hard to imagine something so foreign, so take a look at this real quick and see if you still feel that way. Ultimately a floating city wouldn't be very different from where you live now, just it could be free of the current political constraints if we start it as a libertarian city from the beginning.
Some small points:
A libertarian republic is a antithetical in terms. A republic is dependent upon the common man and the general will. It is meant to look out for this common man. A libertarian is hyper-individualistic in the sense of grounding rights not in commonality or general preference. It looks out for individuals specifically and not general blocs.
I think bitcoin is not a viable money. It does not follow Mises Regression theorum. It is backed no more then current fiat.
I think if Waco and Ruby Ridge have shown anything it is that the government is not against killing civilians even if they are Americans.
'Men do not change, they unmask themselves' - Germaine de Stael
Andrew Cain: Some small points:
Bring 'em :)
Andrew Cain:A libertarian republic is a antithetical in terms. A republic is dependent upon the common man and the general will. It is meant to look out for this common man.
It may be that libertarians have been slightly wrong about this, or haven't examined it closely enough, or considered the mechanism I want to use. Firstly, what do you mean by "dependent upon the common man and general will" because in a society absent democracy there's no place for the general will, there is only the individual will and free association. In a society run by democracy, I grant you that one can only obtain power by claiming to look out for the common man. But a republic does not automatically imply democracy. Autarchy dispenses with democracy for something yet unlabeled as a mechanism, the individual adoption of private law. No general will, individual will.
Andrew Cain: A libertarian is hyper-individualistic in the sense of grounding rights not in commonality or general preference. It looks out for individuals specifically and not general blocs.
Agreed, sure. When you remove from society the ability of anyone to force laws on others, then there's no more creation of "general blocs" to obtain and hold political power.
Andrew Cain: I think bitcoin is not a viable money. It does not follow Mises Regression theorum. It is backed no more then current fiat.
Let's say you're correct, and you may be. Bitcoin still functions great as a transfer of value. It's currently being used heavily that way. Even if it were gold at the start and gold at the end, using it to transfer value which is then cashed out at the end works perfectly.
Andrew Cain:I think if Waco and Ruby Ridge have shown anything it is that the government is not against killing civilians even if they are Americans.
Waco was still inside the US's jurisdiction. What I propose won't be. Lookup the Principality of Sealand for precedence. They've been left alone for decades now. Even after violently siezing power. Even after conducting various battles at sea with pirate forces including use of guns and firebombs.
My thoughts on this is that you should be awesome and live a rewarding life. Work hard play hard. Make what money you can, what friends you can, put together a family if you can. Enjoy yourself and make yourself a paragon of virtue. Draw people into your world and inspire them to be their better selves. In the short term whilst you are doing this be available to seekers and speak the truth to them about liberty et al, but dont become that crazy libertarian person, be that awesome dude who knows about it if you want to ask...
Finally, when you are retired, your children grown and independent, when you have sated your youthful lusts and indulgences; re-dedicate yourself to liberty. Go to jail for a cause like Irwin Schiff, give of yourself to reach out to others like Ron Paul. Be a bad ass radical in your old age
Where there is no property there is no justice; a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid
Fools! not to see that what they madly desire would be a calamity to them as no hands but their own could bring
@Finest
Have you been following the development of a charter city in Honduras?
nirgrahamUK:Finally, when you are retired, your children grown and independent, when you have sated your youthful lusts and indulgences; re-dedicate yourself to liberty. Go to jail for a cause like Irwin Schiff, give of yourself to reach out to others like Ron Paul. Be a bad ass radical in your old age
It's a good plan for regular people, I guess. I'm just one of those who is unwilling to wait. And also, I don't think fighting the system from within is likely to do any good, even going to jail and all that. You may end up hurting your cause more than helping it.
There are people who have literally dedicated their entire lives to just one small cause, to something like fixing schools, from within the system, or by trying to collect power within the system and do it that way, ie: the Ron Paul approach. If you work in the system, you will face the choice of power or principle, and you will probably choose power, because your goal is to change things.
We've seen lately Paul Ryan soften his various positions to accept a power position. He will probably hate himself in a few or many years time for abrogating principle and being powerless to do anything about a lot of stuff--not that he was even very libertarian to begin with and he's still softening principle!
Maybe with a few more decades of people doing stuff like that, some minor change and momentum might arrive. Probably not until some disasters have already hit us as a result of current policy. We've got a fiscal time-bomb in this nation waiting to pop, with insane borrowing levels and socialized healthcare dropping, and libertarians probably won't have enough power and numbers to run with the ball after the fumble.
Crises creates political will, which means crises move statism forward--not backward. All the libertarians hoping for the system to crash have got it backwards. The crashed system only means the statist program advances. Even if the US went down as a political entity, we could not raise up a libertarian standard in its wake, and what happens if we win the war in the US but lose it in the UN, what if a global nation state rises up and claims jurisdiction over the entire planet, as the statists already want to create.
Then we're screwed.
Even a complete meltdown of the dollar wouldn't automatically mean the failure of political institutions in the US, and likely wouldn't result in a libertarian upswing philosophically. Because libertarians tend to overlook the power of the intellectual elites (college professors and teachers) and opinion shapers (news) to shape reactions to events and desired outcomes among the populace.
Until the intellectual elites become libertarians, change is not possible within the US. Now ask yourself how likely it is the intellectual elites will ever become libertarians.
Hell will freeze over first.
I'm going to describe this strategy, give it the name 'Conversion'.
The Conversion strategy claims that the best avenue for change is to convert an existing nation state via influence within. However, it's been nearly 50 years since the resurrection of the libertarian doctrine, and our patron saint, Rothbard, has already produced clear and intellectually pure statements of libertarian theory, meaning that what was so long lacking, good theory, we now have. That's what the entire past was missing. We have it. We should be pinching ourselves for joy.
I prefer the Western strategy, meaning "Go West, young man". Whenever people faced religious and political persecution, for the last many hundred years, they have gone West to the New World.
That worked for a good long time, until we ran out of new world to move to.
Why spend literally decades, possibly hundreds of years, trying to overcome a rigged system built on democracy, where political power is gained by the arbitrage of stupidity in the masses, when you can foot vote into a new seasteaded community literally built by and for libertarians and begin living as a libertarian immediately.
I say, don't merely start a family and live a life under tyranny and then retire. Rather, considering moving your family into a libertarian community and retiring there.
I know such a place does not exist yet, but if it did, would this not be a far better tactic? If the US became libertarian by our efforts, would not the libertarians of the rest of the world flock here? They would.
Surely it's incredibly easy to simply dismiss everything I say here with, 'but such a place still doesn't exist."
Fine. It's just words for now, but, I plan to start one and get it up and running. But even if I don't, someone else will. Seasteading is not going to disappear. It gets easier and more inevitable with each passing year. If we populate a seasteading nation early with libertarians, we can create a mass libertarian culture.
If we let seasteading develop without us, then it will become just another statist institution getting in the way of the existence of a free society. And then you really will have to wait hundreds of years, because the next time creating a new libertarian society will become viable is via space colonization. Good luck with that.
This is a unique historical epoch, right now: Seasteading on the verge, no existing jurisdiction over the seas, prior to the establishment of one world government, with the US distracted by terrorism and its growing debt crises which is about to be kicked into overdrive by health care.
Your suggestion is certainly better than doing nothing, and a good one in the absense of a seasteaded libertarian community, but if in say ~5 years there's an actual libertarian community of a few thousand individuals seasteading a libertarian community off the coast of California, you wouldn't jump? Sure, it would have to make sense financially and job-wise, but given that it did?
"It may be that libertarians have been slightly wrong about this, or haven't examined it closely enough, or considered the mechanism I want to use. Firstly, what do you mean by "dependent upon the common man and general will" because in a society absent democracy there's no place for the general will, there is only the individual will and free association. In a society run by democracy, I grant you that one can only obtain power by claiming to look out for the common man. But a republic does not automatically imply democracy. Autarchy dispenses with democracy for something yet unlabeled as a mechanism, the individual adoption of private law. No general will, individual will."
If it is self-government then it is not a republic. A republic is a common man government where its laws and machinations are aimed at protecting said common man. Self-government is dependent upon self.
"Agreed, sure. When you remove from society the ability of anyone to force laws on others, then there's no more creation of "general blocs" to obtain and hold political power."
And thus it is no longer a republic.
"Let's say you're correct, and you may be. Bitcoin still functions great as a transfer of value. It's currently being used heavily that way. Even if it were gold at the start and gold at the end, using it to transfer value which is then cashed out at the end works perfectly."
I don't think it even does that well. Bitcoin is something new that masses are not engaging it. It is really only a niche market which is why it has a high perceived value.
"Waco was still inside the US's jurisdiction. What I propose won't be. Lookup the Principality of Sealand for precedence. They've been left alone for decades now. Even after violently siezing power. Even after conducting various battles at sea with pirate forces including use of guns and firebombs."
Yea because Sealand does not matter. Sealand is just a building upon two cement blocks. The US kills Americans within its borders and has a long history of dehumanizing foreigners in order to kill them. Whether your seaport is in or out of America does not effect whether the United States would be willing to destroy it.
"My thoughts on this is that you should be awesome and live a rewarding life. Work hard play hard. Make what money you can, what friends you can, put together a family if you can. Enjoy yourself and make yourself a paragon of virtue. Draw people into your world and inspire them to be their better selves. In the short term whilst you are doing this be available to seekers and speak the truth to them about liberty et al, but dont become that crazy libertarian person, be that awesome dude who knows about it if you want to ask..."
Right on nir. You have only one life. Live it well and be happy.
I love the idea of an anarcho-capitalist/libertarian city or island, but what if you did have the place in what the state considers to be it's own waters? If you're breaking their own laws (by having things such as drugs and prostitution and what not) on the island, then they could easily shut down the place. Therefore, you'd really have to find some extremely isolated place, where it would be hard as heck to get resources. Even then, any nation could easily shut the place down by supressing the flow of goods.
I could say I like the idea of purchasing land from a poor country to set up an anarchist community, however there are problems with that too (who purchases the land, what happens then, etc.)
Andrew Cain:If it is self-government then it is not a republic. A republic is a common man government where its laws and machinations are aimed at protecting said common man. Self-government is dependent upon self.
Strictly speaking, a republic denotes the a society will be based on written law. Not all those other ideas you've crammed into it. Republicanism can be separated from a government being focused on the common man.
The fact that modern governments are focused on the common man is actually the product of democracy, because one must appeal to the broadest voting block in order to obtain political power in a democracy, and therefore in a democracy one must appeal to the 'common man.' However, a republic absent democracy would not display the same characteristics but would be fundamentally different in character, just as a monarchical republic is not all about the common man but about the struggle between the king and the oligarchy, as in England before strictly modern times, before common suffrage and thus before democracy, when the parliament was mainly a check on the king.
Andrew Cain: "Agreed, sure. When you remove from society the ability of anyone to force laws on others, then there's no more creation of "general blocs" to obtain and hold political power." And thus it is no longer a republic.
The concept of a repulic does not denote the forced jurisdiction of laws either.
Andrew Cain: Bitcoin is something new that masses are not engaging it. It is really only a niche market which is why it has a high perceived value.
Unless you count recent stories about Europeans abandoning the Euro in droves and bying bitcoin as value store.
Andrew Cain:Yea because Sealand does not matter. Sealand is just a building upon two cement blocks. The US kills Americans within its borders and has a long history of dehumanizing foreigners in order to kill them. Whether your seaport is in or out of America does not effect whether the United States would be willing to destroy it.
It depends. Partly it will rely on how sneakily I can get the system up and running under their noses :) eventually if you hit critical mass population, there's no stopping it anymore.
SkepticalMetal:I love the idea of an anarcho-capitalist/libertarian city or island, but what if you did have the place in what the state considers to be it's own waters?
Well, again, I'm explicitly starting this outside their jurisdiction in international waters. Which is only 14 miles out. Still within their exclusive economic zone tho, but we won't be fishing their shit, so should be fine. After critical mass, moving outside their EEZ is equally plausible.
SkepticalMetal:If you're breaking their own laws (by having things such as drugs and prostitution and what not) on the island, then they could easily shut down the place. Therefore, you'd really have to find some extremely isolated place, where it would be hard as heck to get resources. Even then, any nation could easily shut the place down by supressing the flow of goods.
I'm gonna focus on industry. Since it's a decentralized society, should be easy to shut down certain people without affecting others.
"Strictly speaking, a republic denotes the a society will be based on written law. Not all those other ideas you've crammed into it. Republicanism can be separated from a government being focused on the common man.
The fact that modern governments are focused on the common man is actually the product of democracy, because one must appeal to the broadest voting block in order to obtain political power in a democracy, and therefore in a democracy one must appeal to the 'common man.' However, a republic absent democracy would not display the same characteristics but would be fundamentally different in character, just as a monarchical republic is not all about the common man but about the struggle between the king and the oligarchy, as in England before strictly modern times, before common suffrage and thus before democracy, when the parliament was mainly a check on the king."
Actually that is the definition of a republic. A commonwealth. A society based upon appealing to the common man and their values. A society based upon written law is a constitutional society. That is why Britian is a constitutional monarchy and the U.S. is a constitutional republic. We both have written codes (the constitutional part) but we have different mechinations toward the running of government. There is no such thing as a monarchical republic. They are two different mechincations of governing. Democracy, traditionally, meant an absence of hierarchical structure. A politican was no better then a farmer if one were to be a democrat. Now the definition has turned into an oddity and is simply defined as mass voting.
"The concept of a repulic does not denote the forced jurisdiction of laws either."
No but we are talking about political power and political power only matters when there is a government in force. I mean what is the purpose of political power if there is a system of anarchy?
"Unless you count recent stories about Europeans abandoning the Euro in droves and bying bitcoin as value store."
A bit of an exaggeration. I never said that people were not buying bitcoins. I said it is a niche market which is why it has such a highly perceived value.
"It depends. Partly it will rely on how sneakily I can get the system up and running under their noses :) eventually if you hit critical mass population, there's no stopping it anymore."
It was never a question of stopping it per say. It was a question of whether they would have no qualms about stopping it. Whether it is an American colony or not does not effect whether they would try.