No, but accepting several billion dollars from a billionaire-who-would-be-king would fix several other of Sudan’s problems.
Nah, Sudan would just spend it all on hookers and blow anyway.
Just like I would.
What?!? Hard to believe that no one has mentioned Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, and his island that he owns in the Long Island sound, which he declared the nation of North Dumpling.
All arose over his desire to install a wind turbine on his island in order to achieve a negative carbon footprint there. Initially the local authorities said no, as his island was zoned as a residential area which limited the height of structures. So he declared his island a sovereign nation.
There is always Antarctica; I’m not sure what the response would be if a billionaire built his own private base there and declared it to be sovereign territory.
Also, eventually, there will have to be a political discussion about establishing permanent bases on the Moon and possibly MArs.
The Marie Byrd part is your best bet but even that is of interest to people with nukes.
Yeah, one of the things that people talking about making a new country never talk about is what they plan to do with their newly independent chunk of land. I’m not sure what your billionaire plans to do on a hunk of land without access to modern banking infrastructure and with no army protecting it that he can’t just do by being a rich bastard in a first world country with all kinds of luxuries; or in a second or third world country with fewer luxuries but less interference. The Libertarian view always seems to be something like ‘drugs, guns, and prostitutes!’ but rich people generally have no trouble getting all the drugs and prostitutes they want, and little trouble with guns.
And what will the billionaire and his mercenaries eat in Antarctica? And where will they get heating fuel? The nations that have divvied up Antarctica could simply blockade the nearest landing port and not let in any supplies.
All of these fantasies assume there is prime land going unused, somewhere in the world.
The reality is that areas with low population densities are not very productive lands. That’s why they have low population densities.
It takes special training and resources to live off those types of lands (e.g. Canada’s north), or a complete dependence on supplies from outside (Antarctica).
Any billionaire’s money will run out, especially if there are nations devoting resources to frustrating the liberation plans.
Amongst their options would be allowing the billionaire to pay over the billions, install himself in the disputed lands, and then just send in their own army to kick him out again, perhaps using the upgraded military equipment they bought with some of the billions.
Win-win for Sudan!
The military and security resources of a country, even a poor country, will always be better than the military resources of a single person.
I think you vastly underestimate the [del]sucker’s[/del] market for libertopian ventures. Theil poured gazillions into the Seafaring institute, chuckle. And let’s not forget Galt’s Gulch, Chile, 11,000 acres of fraud. I mean it was certainly libertarian, insofar as the property was sold without obtaining such instruments of tyranny as proper zoning or water rights and basically ignoring Chile’s know your customer laws. I mean why bother negotiating sovereignty with big governments when your customer base [del]are easy marks for affinity fraud[/del] loves freedom too much to sweat the details?
Or consider Minerva Reefs a 1972 libertarian experience. Our heroes succeeded in carting in sand from Australia, creating some above sea level property as well as the beginnings of a platform. They were chased away by the Tongan military. Other visionary efforts outlined here.
Admittedly the scale is different. Small time libertarians lose their shirt to low life fraudsters. Big time libertarians lose similar amounts to smooth talking non-profit directors, but they can afford it.
I was wondering if one could simply build a new island (at enormous expense) and claim that as a new nation, but the Wikipedia article on Sealandsays nope:
Microcountry advocates never seen to be able to answer the question of what all the other established countries have to gain by treating your microcountry as a real country.
Yes there are lots of places in the world that operate more or less without much oversight from the local authorities. The powers that be are often willing to turn a blind eye to places where the normal rules don’t apply, because they see the value of those places.
But those places are nominally under the control of some jurisdiction or other. Now why do you think that is? Even in Somalia after the government collapsed it wasn’t an anarchist paradise. In actual fact various tribal leaders, religious leaders, and warlords controlled the territory. Same with Kowloon Walled City was ruled by Triads.
I am actually aware that the actual logistics of establishing a new country in Antarctica would be cost prohibitive and probably suicidal. Most of the people who have tried to start a new country don’t seem to be that forward thinking though. So it wouldn’t surprise me if someone actually tried.
I was thinking of Fordlandia, purchased by Henry Ford who was trying to get into the rubber market by purchasing an island from, IIRC, Brazil. It was for all intents and purposes his sovereign land (I think he promised part of the profit, if any, to Brazil as well as a big pile of up front cash). It didn’t pan out and eventually he sold it back, but in the past it wasn’t as ridiculous as some in this thread are making it out to be.
Today, you probably could find some sovereign country willing to part with some of their territory for a very large cash donation, though I’m unsure why you’d want to since the places that might be up for it wouldn’t be the ones you’d want to take the risk that they wouldn’t renege after the deal was done. I mean, if lil Kimmy 3.0 offered a small island off the coast of North Korea for a cool billion or so in hard currency, would you trust him to let you keep it once the money was in his large swimming pool and he was splashing around in it? :dubious:
If you’re a billionaire you can already build yourself a compound in the Canadian tundra and live there by yourself, and nobody is going to bother you. Why do you need this parcel of tundra to be recognized as an independent country? What are the benefits to you?
No taxes? If you’re a billionaire it’s because you own companies that operate in the world market. Those companies pay taxes in the localities they operate in. I can move my house to a tax haven but I can’t move my company there because my company only makes money by providing goods and services to people who live in places where people live. If you just need a corporate tax haven, then move to the Cayman Islands.
Drugs? Dude, if you’re a billionaire who wants to smoke weed, there are easier ways to accomplish that than to start your own country. Same with prostitutes.
If your problem is environmental regulations and such, well, are you going to be relocating your factories to the remote tundra? And the factory workers? And the transportation infrastructure? And the housing for your factory workers? And their kids? Build schools, your own private system of law enforcement, and so on? There’s a reason people don’t build factories in the middle of vast tracts of uninhabitable land, despite the land there being cheap. Industry needs infrastructure, and manufacturing the infrastructure out of whole cloth on some barren island thousands of miles from nowhere isn’t going to be cheap. It’s the opposite of cheap. And the point of the factory is to make money, yes? And that’s why people build factories where there are already workers and transportation infrastructure. And the local government that provides the infrastructure is a benefit to your factory, not a drag on it.
Rich people really do retire and move to ranches in Montana or wherever. Taxes are low, zoning regulations are sparse. But the problem is that you’re living on a ranch in Montana. Rich people often would rather live in New York or London or Paris or LA, where things are happening. But if you want a quiet life off the grid, then that’s great, and it’s easy to accomplish without needing your own private country.
Perhaps, for the purposes of this discussion, we could posit that the billionaire in question has a raging hard-on to run his own country. The only solution for that is to … y’know … run your own country.
I guess the way to do it then would be to find some existing country and get them to pass a law, sign a treaty, or whatever to cede land to you to start your own country. If that did happen, and there is no question that the mother country legally gave up claim to the land, what would the international reaction be?
The reasons why this won’t happen are obvious. No microcountry initiative has ever actually succeeded. You can declare your house or some island an independent country, but nobody will actually act as if your house is an independent country.
Nobody cares if you declare yourself king of Lemuria. But you’re not going to avoid taxes by declaring yourself king of Lemuria, you’re not going to get to smoke pot because you’re king of Lemuria, you’re not going to be allowed to own child porn because you’re king of Lemuria, you’re not going to be allowed to dump chemical waste into your neighbor’s back yard because you’re king of Lemuria.
Take a real-life tiny country like Liechtenstein. Do you think the Prince of Liechtenstein gets do do whatever he likes just because he’s the ruler of a 160 square kilometer state with a population of 37,000? No, because he’s not a dictator, he’s a constitutional monarch. And he just rules over a tiny patch of countryside and a small town. And his state is only independent because his neighbors tolerate it. They think it’s cute. There are no border patrols between Liechtenstein and Switzerland. Liechtenstein does operate as something of a tax haven, but that just puts it under the thumb of the various companies using it as a tax haven. It can’t make itself obnoxious to it’s neighbors, or it will lose it’s independent status.
There are a few oil-rich small states, like Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait that are famously autocratic, and the ruling families quite wealthy. And these countries have frequently found themselves under external threat, and are forced to ally themselves to outside countries to maintain independence. We didn’t protect Kuwait against Iraq because we were in love with state sovereignty, we did it because we didn’t want Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to get control over Kuwait’s oil wealth.
What exactly are you offering the United States that they’re going to recognize your newly fledged country and take you under their defense umbrella? Bribes? Dude, a billionaire can bribe some Senators, and spread around some lobbyist money. But a billion only gets you so far.
The truth is that starting your own country for your own reasons isn’t going to work. It won’t get you whatever it is you think you want, and it won’t succeed anyway. The people who have succeeded in setting up new countries or autonomous regions in the last 50 years aren’t people with a lot of cash, they’re people who run ideological or nationalist movements that were able to field credible military forces to protect their new countries, or who had outside backing, like the various Russian-backed autonomous regions of various former Soviet republics. But those aren’t independent playpens for Billionaire fancy-lads, they’re military dictatorships who answer to Vladimir Putin.
Real people don’t work like that. Billionaires have massive power and can have extreme levels of control over a local area without having to live in a shithole in the middle of nowhere that they can’t even do modern banking from, much less get good entertainment or health care in. If they want to trip on power, they can do a lot of very real things instead of living a worse life than a poor person in the US just to say ‘this is my own country’. And if they are crazily obsessed with the idea to that point, their lack of sanity is a good argument for other countries not to recognize whatever weird hellhole they’ve gotten a deed to.
Naysayers and linear thinkers look at this list of farsighted paradises and quote Michael Lind “Why are there no libertarian countries? If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines?” But where some see risk or credulousness or gullibility, others see opportunity.
Whether you are world historic patriot like Tony Stark, John Galt or other fictional creations, or just a home-grown fanatic/enthusiast for conveniently tangential notions of liberty, investing in micronations can serve your emotional needs. Why would a billionaire or multimillionaire participate in such a venture, given that there are far more straightforward methods of securing recreational drugs, for-pay companionship, unregulated slot machines, recreational drugs, and recreational drugs? In a word, freedom, an ideologically driven desire to stack up your wealth and light it on fire.
I’m happy to report that such a nation has been established. There is a place where nobody pays taxes they don’t want to, anyone can smoke pot or dump chemical waste on their own private property, while booze, sushi, gambling, prostitution, are completely unregulated. No health codes, no fire codes, no instruments of tyranny. That nation is called Asgarida, aka the Space Kingdom of Asgardia. They are currently in orbit. They have a government, MPs, 12 Ministries. They just lack residents. Now admittedly they don’t appear to totally share a strictly libertarian dream. But they have achieved it nonetheless.