Libertarian Island Countries Being Built

[Little_Nemo]

@pbbth

I would love to see this actually happen. If it works out well then more power to them and they will all stay there and enjoy their political paradise and if it crashes and burns maybe some of the people I know who espouse these views will shut the hell up about paying taxes being the same thing as being mugged by the government.

In my opinion, here are the four possible outcomes, ranked from best to worst:

1. They build a society based on libertarian principles and make it work. We all learn a new way that humans can live.

2. They build a society based on libertarian principles and it fails and everyone recognizes the failure. We don’t learn anything new but at least libertarians are a little more humble with their claims.

3. They build a society based on libertarian principles and it fails but some people deny the failure. Libertarians make a lot of excuses about how the experiment proves nothing.

4. They build a society that isn’t based on libertarian principles but declare it’s proof of libertarianism. The scenario I described earlier where the supposedly libertarian society is actually dependent on ongoing support from outside.

I wish them the best of luck. I look at libertarianism the way I look at research into psychic powers: I expect they’re going to fail but I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

[Bosstone]

#3 is most likely. The GD thread is already prepping with reasons why the manufactured islands won’t work well for providing for true libertarianism. I make no claim as to the validity of those reasons.

[robardin]

#3 seems the most likely because even when viewed objectively (Objectivistily?), libertarianism essentially presupposes an early-20th-Century America as its setting, if not a global setting - where all these great creative people have everything they need to build and create whatever they can imagine.

But if you’re living on a floating platform somewhere offshore in international ocean waters, you don’t even have potable water as a basic resource. You’ll be bartering or trading for practically every necessity of life. Whatever the merits or demerits of a Libertarian socio-economic philosophy, this particular experimental society will in fact prove nothing. What it will prove, though, is that an large offshore settlement with free trade, minimal laws and (presumably) no extradition agreements due to the lack of a strong central administration to arrest and remand fugitives… Would probably get taken over by pirates, gangsters and other thugs with money who need exactly such a place.

[Diceman]

I agree it’s doomed to failure. An ocean platform is just about the worst possible location for such an experiment, in fact. You begin with nothing: no land, no drinkable water, no power source except maybe solar. About the only way you could possibly make the situation worse would be if you were stuck on an artic ice flow.