Paypal Founder Helping Build Artificial Island Nations

MadMartigan2001 writes with a pretty crazy article on a project involving floating libertarian paradises. From the article: "PayPal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters. Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties."

Comments

Re:Only as "free" as your ability to defend it

[NeutronCowboy]

Even the American colonies were not really Libertarian. If anything, they were patriarchical societies with power deriving strongly from biblical interpretations of how power is to be distributed. And even if you assume that they were Libertarian examples, they failed as they were absorbed into the nascent USA.

As a matter of fact, the complete absence of stable, working Libertarian societies indicates the failure of the model. You really think that over 2000 years, no one has ever tried what Libertarians advocate? Since Libertarianism is basically an offshoot of anarchism, which was a philosophy very much en vogue in the mid-19th century, it has a history behind it: anything from attempts to bring on general anarchy in Europe in general to anarchistic communes centered around various European population centers. All those attempts failed even more quickly than communism.

If what Thiel said is true - that governments compete with each other, with the best one coming out on top - the fact that Libertarian governments don't exist is proof that they are even worse than the currently existing governments. If governments don't compete against each other based on their merits, then his effort is doomed to failure before it even gets started. If he is advocating a set of rules for a group of people to live together - well, that's great, but that's not a form of government. That's a commune, on par with hippies living in tree huts and making beads for tourists.

Libertarian philosophy is nice in theory, but completely fails in practice.

I don't see this society as working out AT ALL. Its essentially neo-feudalism.

Quite possible. Except that the closest thing we have to a libertarian society is Somalia. I prefer neo-feudalism.