Paypal Founder Helping Build Artificial Island Nations 692
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."
Only as "free" as your ability to defend it (Score:5, Insightful)
This idea has been tried several times and it always ends the same way (with fail [wikipedia.org]). Think about it, if it were really that easy to declare your own country with its own laws, every asshole with a sea-worthy boat would be proclaiming his own little kingdom. Idiots who believe you can do this are the same morons who think that you can murder someone in international waters [straightdope.com] and not face prosecution or that you can get out of paying taxes [wikipedia.org] by sending a letter to the IRS stating that you refuse to recognize their authority (ask Wesley Snipes if that shit works).
The only real way to establish your own country is to get the people of an existing country to elect you dictator or to stage a coup overthrowing the existing leader (or at least seize a portion of their existing territory). And even then, your rule is only as stable as your ability to defend it (from both internal and external threats).
So if you plan on setting up your own little kingdom on some old oil rig just off the U.S. coast (or coast of any country) and doing whatever you want, you had better damn sure be ready to defend yourself when the Navy shows up in a big, heavily armed ship looking to introduce you to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea [wikipedia.org] and the concept of Universal Jurisdiction [wikipedia.org]. And if it's the U.S. Navy, you're probably going to need a *lot* of firepower on your little oil rig, Your Majesty.
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I was always amused by the heaps of love /. gave "Sealand." What a joke that was/is.
Re:Only as "free" as your ability to defend it (Score:5, Funny)
Kill the pig! Slit her throat!
Bash her in! Kill the pig!
Slit her throat!
Bash her in! Kill the pig!
Slit her throat! Bash her in!
Kill the pig! Slit her throat!
Bash her in!
Kill the pig!
Look. We killed a pig!
We stole up on it!
You let the fire out.
We can light it up again.
You should have been
with us, Ralph.
There was lots of blood!
You should have seen it.
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it's a myopic post that paints libertarians as extreme.. libertarians are not anarchists. I see nothing about them extreme compared to the 'lets dig ourselves in deeper' compromise offered as a solution from the two big parties.
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Re:Only as "free" as your ability to defend it (Score:4, Insightful)
Referencing a popular book doesn't make a post insightful. It was trite and pretentious, I'm guessing the person who wrote it is 16.
I'm guessing with an ID# of 137, the person is 30 or older.
Re:Only as "free" as your ability to defend it (Score:4, Insightful)
I say it is great social experiment to prove how idiotic the whole idea can be.
So let these people have their paradise and maybe they will stop going bug-f*** on the rest of us.
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I didn't notice libertarians express any disinterest when their corporations got government bailouts, paid for by taxpayers.
Were you looking [google.com] for it at all?
I've never heard of a libertarian complain that the government interfered in blocking union workers from aggressive strike behavior.
Not all libertarians are anarcho-capitalists [lewrockwell.com]. Randians [aynrandlexicon.com] for example would not mind the government stopping violent thugs.
I've never heard of a libertarian complain that he didn't wish to receive Social Security or Medicare, when eligible.
When a robber offers to return some of what he stole from you it's not immoral to accept it back. Most libertarians believe that the same thing applies to the state and what it taxed from you.
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Re:Only as "free" as your ability to defend it (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see a military raid being an option in any case.
Yeah, you just keep telling yourself that.
Re:Only as "free" as your ability to defend it (Score:4, Insightful)
Lawyers do jack shit without a court room.
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obstetrical
"You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."
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No, it's correct. Basically if a lot of people are arguing heatedly then suddenly a woman goes into labor, the fights will stop and people will either stand around embarrassed or run off to start boiling some water.
Re:Only as "free" as your ability to defend it (Score:4, Insightful)
Saddam Hussein had a standing militia of Iraqi and international lawyers. It didn't stop Operation Desert Fox, 11 years of airstrikes, or the invasion of Iraq. And they didn't save him from an execution.
One can't put an injunction on a SEAL/Delta/CIA team.
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Your liberty to move your fist ends where my face starts.
Replace fist with "thermonuclear device", and then sit back and really think about how much liberty your ashes will have. One of the problems with Libertarianism is that it can't deal pro-actively with problems. You can't do anything about the sloppily run reactor until after it has melted down and destroyed your property (if you're one of the "lucky" survivors).
The central idea of most libertarians is that they know enough about everything to be able to make smart, rational decisions about everything. P
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you had better damn sure be ready to defend yourself when the Navy shows up in a big, heavily armed ship looking to introduce you to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
Only if you think the navy is likely to waste the time and money to travel to you. Which, sorry to hurt anyone's inflated ego, they're not going to unless you try to take with you a nuke or lay claim to an oil rig.
If you're really worried about it, get citizenship from some small country, preferably a landlocked one, THEN declare your island independent. Luxembourg doesn't have a navy, for example. If you're not a US citizen on paper, the US navy probably won't come trying to enforce Luxembourg's ta
Old joke (Score:4, Funny)
Old Hungarian joke:
- Where do you work?
- At the Ministry of Naval Affairs.
- Are you kidding, we don't even have a seashore!
- Hey, we got a Ministry of Public Welfare too.
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If you're really worried about it, get citizenship from some small country, preferably a landlocked one, THEN declare your island independent. Luxembourg doesn't have a navy, for example. If you're not a US citizen on paper, the US navy probably won't come trying to enforce Luxembourg's tax laws.
Doesn't work that way. If you're an American citizen and try to do this, the U.S. can just declare it a fraud under the aforementioned United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. You can't just fly any flag on your little island, you have to have a real *legitimate* connection with said country. And even if they did accept your obvious attempt at fraudulent abuse of a new citizenship, you're still subject to the aforementioned Universal Jurisdiction. Either way, they'll get you if they want you. and if
Re:Only as "free" as your ability to defend it (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are an American, you can renounce your citizenship by going to practically any embassy or consul office and making a formal statement disclaiming your citizenship. After that, you have about ten years to continue to pay income taxes if you don't want the U.S. federal government going after your for tax evasion. You do get credit from the IRS where you can deduct taxes paid to another government if those taxes are higher than what you would have paid if the money was earned in the USA. After that clock has run out, you are completely separated from American society and you are free to do whatever you want to do in that regard. You may be a stateless person [wikipedia.org], which has its own set of headaches and most embassy officials will try to discourage you from renouncing citizenship for that purpose alone.
Some other countries have similar laws for renouncing citizenship.... but not all of them. I know Greece and Turkey have citizenship claims for up to three generations after a citizen leaves their nations, as do a few other countries as well. That counts if you are a young man and suddenly find yourself drafted into the armies of those respective countries even though you may be a third generation removed from anybody in those countries. Michael Dukakis, for example, technically held dual citizenship with Greece when he ran for President of the U.S.A. and was also eligible to run for the office of President of Greece. Citizenship can be a tricky thing even if you want to get out of it completely.
As for establishing a new state, on a practical matter I think the grandparent post pretty much summed it up. If you have big guns to fight off would-be pirates and other idiots, have enough firepower where major military action would be needed to enforce laws upon your hunk of would-be real estate, and if you are some place that otherwise a country has no claim..... you may have the potential to create a real country. The rest is self-sustainability so you don't necessarily need cooperation from other countries.
One of the problems with Sealand is that they were so dependent upon the United Kingdom that they might as well be a part of that country too. Electrical power, groceries, and even most transportation links went through the UK and the "country" was so small that it really didn't have much to offer except strictly as a tax haven or trying to evade the law. If somehow some significant industries could be built or a service could be provided which sets your country apart, your independent sovereign claim is much easier to enforce and there is a higher likelihood that other countries will "recognize" your claim. If you can get a large enough group of people to join you, it also makes it easier to claim "nationhood", as most "microstates" are usually a single family or very small group.
In other words, being genuinely independent in all areas of life really is the key here. If you depend upon the assistance of a government in some capacity, you lose at least some of your independence regardless of how other governments think of you. Then again, it was many decades where the People's Republic of China was not recognized as a legitimate country. They still existed and pretty much went about their business not caring if anybody else wanted to deal with them.... until it was impossible to ignore a billion people as a market for products.
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The simple fact of the matter is that you'll never hear about them, and the ones that do it for the sole purpose of avoiding taxes broke the law, so the IRS will still sieze everything you own in the US and make sure that if you ever change planes in the US you'll be arrested. So many don't do it because you'll never be able to go to the US again to visit family or transit through to another country.
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Artificial structures are not recognized as territory. It fails at #1. No domestic or international court will allow you to create an artificial island and declare it sovereign territory. Even if you could somehow meaningfully defend it, it's irrelevant. Under international law, a floating island you built would just be a big boat.
Re:Only as "free" as your ability to defend it (Score:4, Informative)
"Luxembourg doesn't have a navy, ..."
Not anymore. We have half a navy ship, shared with Belgium. :-)
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/europe/clst-h.htm [globalsecurity.org]
Navy or not, there are 150 ships registered in here in Luxembourg and running under its flag.
Re:Only as "free" as your ability to defend it (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Only as "free" as your ability to defend it (Score:4, Insightful)
Well it was the UK military that built the sealand platform in the first place...
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Considering the "Keep government out of my medicare" or some such silliness I see these folks saying I bet their insurance is state provided.
Below is an example of this before you say I made that up.
âoeIf you like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think theyâ(TM)re run well, just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid and health care done by the government.â â"Arthur Laffer on CNN
ERs one of the the most expensive ways to provide care, to make them "free" without
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I'd expect most Tea Partiers to have medical insurance, and so your objection is rather misguided.
44 percent of Tea Party supporters were polled as receiving Medicare or have a family member receiving it.
Their objection is to excessive federal spending (which is absolutely a valid argument, especially when it comes to public health care, which is almost designed to be tremendously wasteful)
The vast majority of Tea Party supporters - 70% according to polls, oppose cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.
Hmmm.
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There is a weird cross-section class that has employer-subsidized health insurance; mostly people in bureaucratic and technocratic roles for larger institutions. These people often seem unaware of how much it would cost them to insure their family if they had to seek out private insurance, if it is even possible (because it is still very common to be denied coverage due to pre-existing conditions.)
What I'm saying is, health insurance for your family that actually covers anything substantial probably has mo
Re:Only as "free" as your ability to defend it (Score:5, Informative)
Terrible poll (you OR a family member?)
Immediate family members... as in the ones that you typically take some personal responsiblity for.
I wouldn't get excited over the "OR a family member" anyway: 32% of Tea Party supports respond affirmative for themselves personally, vs only 22% for all respondants.
Poll q106 Are you, or is any member of your immediate family, covered by Medicare?
Self Identified as Tea Party Supporter
Yes, self - 16%
Yes, other - 12%
Yes, self and other - 16%
No - 56%
All Respondants
Yes, self - 13%
Yes, other - 12%
Yes, self and other - 9%
No - 66%
Tea Partiers were also personally receiving Social Security benefits at a higher rate than the general respondents. 20% of respondents said yes, 35% of Tea Partiers said yes.
The vast majority also support eliminating waste and fraud in all gov't spending, including Medicare and Medicaid.
Seriously, that statement says nothing at all. Good luck finding anyone who doesn't support eliminating waste and fraud in all gov't spending, including Medicare and Medicaid.
Hell, I fully support national health care like what Canada, England, and France have, and guess what I also fully support eliminating waste and fraud.
I'll say that. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll say that. In order for the people in the Tea Party to have a valid point, they cannot WILLINGLY BENEFIT from the programs they publicly oppose.
You should look at that statement more closely.
So they are not opposed to CERTAIN people benefiting from the government programs.
It's just when the WRONG people benefit that they have a problem.
No. The problem is that they're complaining about CERTAIN OTHER PEOPLE using the programs while THEY THEMSELVES benefit from those programs.
They want the BENEFITS (as evidenced by them voluntarily applying for those benefits and using them) but they don't want to pay the taxes if CERTAIN OTHER PEOPLE will also get the benefits.
Re:Only as "free" as your ability to defend it (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think the GP was referring to those who gain a majority of their subsistence through some sort of government payout rather than those who are working to better their lot in life and might need occasional help. With the per median income of that area above $70k per year, I don't think that's the group that was being referred to. The term "productive" is rather broad, and I think you're probably using it in a different way than the GP. For example if we asked "How much wealth does a bus boy generate as
Re:Only as "free" as your ability to defend it (Score:4, Interesting)
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Do you think a Gardner/Landscaper should earn the same as a Doctor? No?? Then why do you complain when a Doctor takes a day off to play golf and drink a martini with the practice's partners?
Or did you see me at the expensive restaurant dressed up really nice because I was taking my wife out for a nice dinner for the first time in seven years, because I could finally afford to?
Tell me, who are you seeing when you paint with such broad strokes? Ever get off your high horse long enough to ask?
Envy is a terrib
Re:Only as "free" as your ability to defend it (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, but it's entirely feasible to set up your own "nation" within an existing governmental structure. Buy some land in the middle of nowhere, make sure you pay your taxes, and handle everything else internally. The overhead of paying taxes to the existing government is small change compared to the running costs of an off-shore sea platform. There already are or have been communes for every brand of "government" you can think of: from flower-power hippies to hardcore anarchists to bureaucratic paradises (also know as HOAs) to survivalists. What do they have in common? They all vanish after a few years, because once those communes get past a certain size, they become what they were trying to get away from. So they either stay small and completely under the radar, or they grow big and get absorbed by their environment.
The more I hear about Libertarians, the less I'm impressed. None of them seem able to learn from past mistakes, understand why things are the way they are now or what the straightforward, repeatedly demonstrated consequences of their pipe-dreams are.
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Re:Only as "free" as your ability to defend it (Score:5, Insightful)
yes, our current system is working, as compared to the usual bullshit the idealistic college sophomore believes
no, the current system is not working, as compared to the easily identifiable problems we all agree on
follow up question, since you know the morons are right around the corner: no, revolution does not fix our problems
WORKING IN the system and FIXING IT by PARTICIPATING in it does
Re:Only as "free" as your ability to defend it (Score:4, Insightful)
Only once you set your racecar on "Go", you find out that that one guy already owns all of the properties and has put hotels on all of them... and then had the rules changed so even the railroads have hotels. Oh, and the Income Tax square has been rewritten so you pay 20% of your "Second Prize in a Beauty Contest" money, but he only pays 10% of his hotel earnings money, minus the amortized cost of buying the hotels and upkeep on his thimble.
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The solution to both isn't less Government, it's more fair Government.
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How quaint. It ignores union busting and anti-union legislation.
There was hardly a middle class in those days, and for anyone who was part of the labor force, your life SUCKED. Libertarianism was a phase we did go through, but left.
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Re:Only as "free" as your ability to defend it (Score:4, Insightful)
They say the same thing about communism.
Re:Only as "free" as your ability to defend it (Score:5, Informative)
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if these folks are so rich it's worthwhile to establish a new country to avoid taxes[...]
Right. In fact, so rich that they could not find a single country in the world with more favorable taxation, to the point where living on a sea platform seems favorable by comparison.
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Pretty much (Score:5, Informative)
Basically, there are two ways to be a sovereign nation:
1) Get international recognition as such. You get the UN members to recognize you as a sovereign nation and support your rights to that end, and you are good for the most part.
2) Have enough guns that nobody can question your sovereignty. If you have a powerful enough military, it doesn't matter what other nations want to say, you are sovereign by the fact that they won't do anything about it.
If you have both of those things, then you are really golden.
However that's it, those are all you have. You either get the big boys to say "Yep you are your own nation," or you have the ability to force it.
You might notice history has worked this way. The US is a sovereign nation because it was able to become so via arms. They said "We aren't subject to Crown law anymore." The Crown disagreed with that and a war was fought, the US won, that made them sovereign. Was shit the British could do at that point, they had been defeated.
The southern US states are not a sovereign nation for the same reason. They declared their sovereignty and left the union to become the Confederate States. The US decided that no, that wasn't ok, union membership was permanent once given, and a war was fought. The Confederate States lost, so they weren't sovereign, they had to be a part of the US again.
It gets worse. (Score:3)
Let's assume the nations of the world, out of the goodness of their hearts, decide to ignore your offshore entity. It's still not going to work because such an entity is going to be intrinsically politically unstable.
The first thing is that the artificial nation is going to have a very small population. Probably the closest analog we could name would be intentional communities, or communes. They generally don't last very long -- certainly not as long as a nation. Most fail in a year or two, a few go on fo
I chose the impossible. (Score:2, Insightful)
I chose... Rapture. A city where the artist would not fear the censor. Where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality. Where the great would not be constrained by the small. And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.
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Would you kindly stop reading Ayn Rand
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seriously?
BioShock, dude.
(Granted, Andrew Ryan has some serious Ayn Rand influence, but still)
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We all know that Rapture didn't float. You're thinking of the setting from the game after Bioshock Infinite.
Every Geek's Dream (Score:2)
Make billions. Build islands out of awesome tech stuff.
Next step?
Build mothership!
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How about this instead?
Make billions,
Spend a couple of millions on a publicity stunt,
???
and what is the hurrcan plan? (Score:2)
and what is the hurrcan plan?
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Ask the US to send the Navy out to rescue you.
and send the bill (Score:2)
and send the bill
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Well, quoting from the article:
So, given floating platform with loose building codes, I think that the hurricane plan is probably disintegration. This may also be the tropical storm plan, the nor'easter plan, the water spout plan, and the
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So you build your four story house out of 2x4s at 32 inches on center, and it falls over and into your neighbor's house, and you don't have any money to cover your neighbor's losses, that's pretty much it for him.
Building codes don't just exist to keep you safe. They exist to keep visitors to your house safe, to keep your neighbors safe, to keep people on the street safe.
A building code, for instance, will say what the minimum attachment requirements are for rafters or trusses and for the roofing sheathing
Beyond the protection of the law, too (Score:3)
It will be interesting the first time a band of pirates (the killing and looting kind, not the sharing kind) storms one of these 'sovereign nations'. I'm guessing they will develop a sudden affection for the country with the nearest naval vessel who can save their bacon.
Re:Beyond the protection of the law, too (Score:4, Funny)
That'll make for an interesting story for the grandkids. "We came to this land to pirate software freely, but then we ran into those looking to freely pirate our land."
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I'm guessing they will develop a sudden affection for the country with the nearest naval vessel who can save their bacon.
Kind of like Norway
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These people are all anti-government until they are become the exploited themselves.
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Frankly, I would expect a libertarian enclave to be considerably better armed than a group of pirates. Partly because without having to support a ridiculous number of government services, they'd have more money left from whatever earnings they managed to achieve; partly because no decent libertarian enclave would have a problem with individuals and groups owning anything from pocket knives to full on missile emplacements; and partly because libertarians are simply more inclined to defend themselves than hav
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So what you're saying is that this will be an island of really rich people. Who will clean their phones or serve their food? Other really rich people? Yeah right. No one would be able to afford a phone cleaning. So they'll have to import labor. Who'll want to work for little money and no social security? Other countries provide far better benefits, so poor people have no reason to emigrate to these countries.
This will end up the same way some smaller Middle East countries are "importing" from poor South-Eas
I know! (Score:3, Funny)
A barge with a nuclear reactor to provide electricity!
An important public service (Score:2, Funny)
Quarantining rabid libertarians out in the middle of the ocean? Where can I send my contribution to this marvelous project?
Wouldn't it be cool if... (Score:3)
... tech billionaires used their cash to say, help find a cure for malaria, instead of telling kids not to get an education, and this latest anti-societal rant?
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Don't you know cures are not good investments?
It's palliatives and maintenance meds where the money is... not something that somebody takes one.
The good of humanity is such just a meaningless concepts to these people.
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Yeah, say what you will about Bill Gates, but at least he's using his money for realistic philantropic efforts, not this egotistical libretardian bullshit.
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Billionaires don't find cures, they find treatments.
Cure = lost a customer.
Treatment = cashflow.
Translation: Rich Guy Buys PR (Score:5, Insightful)
For a paltry $1.25M, a random Rich Guy bought his name in the press, which he will use to stay in the limelight for a little bit. He will then trade on this temporary fame during the launch of his next business venture and keep his Wikipedia entry from being deleted.
Come on... $1.25M? Nobody's building any kind of large-ish sea-worthy vessel for that kind of money, much less a floating office building, data center, residences, etc.
Also, unless he builds it in international waters too (using money he has yet to allocate), how is he going to manage to get it through territorial waters into international waters to begin with? No national authority is going to let a vessel of any size sail out of the dock without registration with an actual country. It doesn't have to be registered in the country it's built in, but it's got to be registered somewhere.
Cryptonomicon (Score:3)
>>Come on... $1.25M? Nobody's building any kind of large-ish sea-worthy vessel for that kind of money, much less a floating office building, data center, residences, etc.
It'll buy you an in at the Sultanate of Kinakuta. Then you just need to find a large stash of hidden Japanese gold from WWII, and you're all set.
If you'd read his business plan, you'd have seen all that.
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I'm sure Burma would be happy to fulfill bogus registrations for small sums of cash.
The most popular flag of convenience, at least recently, was Panama. They simply didn't care as long as you paid your registration fees (and usually a healthy bribe). Last time I looked into this was the Noriega era, its been awhile. There are/were substantial financial reasons to register even a dinky sailboat in a foreign country. US Customs usually provided quite a hassle to "get even" with a cutover point around $1M where above that they treated you with kid gloves, mostly.
Gated++ communities (Score:4, Insightful)
So their gated communities with their private security services aren't enough for these fuckers. Now they want to live in their private countries.
What a waste! There should be a tax on anti-social behavior.
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Burbclaves, they're the future. As long as we get Delivators it won't be a total loss.
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Where (Score:2)
...is Kevin Costner when you need him?
Libertarianism cannot exist alone (Score:2)
By its very nature, be it libertarianism, objectivism, or even polygamy, cannot exist on it own and isolated from the larger society, as it is inherently parasitic. There is much it is incapable of addressing (such as welfare), so it deals with it by simply removing the "problem" from their faux society. So if they do manage to get this off the ground, expect to see a constant flow of people both coming and going just to maintain the untenable ideals of their utopian society.
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Jessh (Score:2)
This is just another tax dodge by someone with too much money. We are heading towards a Phillip K. Dick type world filled with corporate anarchy and the pace is accelerating by the day.
Is anyone surprised? (Score:3)
After all the times we've heard about paypal indefinitely freezing funds without a court order or automatically refunding the buyer in any ebay dispute, this doesn't surpise me; after all the times we've heard them claim they're not a bank and therefore not subject to finance laws (all while holding deposits, issuing debit cards, offering money market accounts, etc.) we should have been surprised if their founder didn't try some hare-brained libertarian scheme to achieve personal sovereignty.
trying to avoid taxes (Score:2)
They've been able to grow rich in large part because of the infrastructure of developed countries, but they're too dishonest to want to help pay for it.
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This needs to be brought up every time one of these jokers complains about welfare.
Does anyone know a study that compares how the poor and rich benefit from ALL government services. I am not talking about just welfare, but from roads, infrastructure, police protection, etc? Someone needs to do that study. My instinct says that the rich and corporations benefit a lot more in terms of dollars than anyone that is on the dole.
Re:trying to avoid taxes (Score:5, Informative)
This is pretty common. The woman who wrote all those harry potter books did it on the dole. When she got her payout she ran for the US to prevent having to pay the UK tax rates that pay for things like the dole.
I don't get this post. You're completely wrong. J.K. Rowling did start the books while on the dole, but she did NOT "run for the US" to avoid taxes. On the contrary, she specifically refused to leave the UK (she currently resides in Edinburgh, Scotland), because she felt she owes a debt to the welfare state of Britain. Here are her actual words, from here [timesonline.co.uk]:
A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major's Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism.
It's pretty clear she's a better person than you are; and I don't understand why you'd post something as far from the truth as you did. Maybe there exists a pathological condition that afflicts conservatives and creates an irressistible compulsion to lie? Just like the other right-winger who suggested Stephen Hawking would have died had he depended on the British National Health Service? (see here [telegraph.co.uk] or here [huliq.com].
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I heard this and accepted it as fact then repeated it.
Please do not call me a right winger, I am far enough left to be considered a socialist in America. Which makes me about centrist on the world stage.
It's a floating Hutt River Province! (Score:3)
"An office park offshore of San Francisco"? (Score:3)
The Seasteading Institute's Patri Friedman says the group plans to launch an office park off the San Francisco coast next year, with the first full-time settlements following seven years later.
Like that's going to work.
People have talked about building artificial islands and setting up their own sovereign states. There are areas of the Caribbean where the ocean is so shallow that this is feasible, and there are plenty of submerged and semi-submerged islands around the world. With enough money, barges, and rock, building an island is possible.
But, under current international law, that doesn't yield sovereignty. The Law of the Sea treaty reads "a naturally formed area of land, which is above water at high tide". Nor can countries expand their territory by building artificial islands. (One of Japan's key boundaries is defined by an island that's worn down to the size of a small bedroom. [dokdo-takeshima.com] A protective breakwater has been built around it at great expense.)
If do-it-yourself sovereignty were going to work, the oil industry, which puts up many offshore structures, some of which are actual islands, would have done it years ago.
Why not just move to Somalia? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why not just move to Somalia? (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't that the natural result of a Libertarian paradise? When governance by a single powerful entity is replaced with the enablement of individuals to accumulate resources and weaponry without limit, then the individuals with the most resources and weapons will grow in strength until they can become powerful enough to subvert or destroy the weak government. This is an intrinsic problem in Libertarian thought - that you can have a weak government and strong unregulated individuals, and yet the government will still have the power to govern those individuals.
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I don't feel this is an accurate portrayal of libertarianism.
What you talk about is definitely a problem in anarchism. When there's no regulation of violence then the most powerful private actors will make the rules and the anarchistic system will vanish.
Under libertarianism though, the government exists and has license to exercise force on behalf of its citizens. The government does not have to be weak in the sense of physical strength. A libertarian government might have an impressive uniformed military f
Excellent idea... (Score:3)
Think about it: 100,000 years ago humans were free to walk on the beach and catch fish to eat. They could also be attacked by the next tribe of canibals looking for food. Everything comes at a price.
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Exactly! We need countries with stronger property rights. For example, did you know that in many countries you can't legally own people? The ability to buy and sell your fellow man is the traditional bedrock of most successful societies. Once unfettered from such silly, non-traditional restrictions, capitalists will have free reign to create a magnificent society the likes of which we have not seen since ancient Greece.
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And in what way is trade "abusively exploitive to labor"
When it's the slave trade?
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It's not exploitation, you have options, you just choose to take the option that involves paying taxes. You could stop paying taxes and go to prison, stop making money or you could move to a country whose values more closely align with yours.
Part of living in a representative democracy is that sometimes the decisions run counter to what you want. Ultimately, you get a choice of living with it, trying to change it or leaving. Remember that demacracy is the worst form of government except all the other ones w
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Just don't come asking for aid and the use of our military when things start to get tough.
That's a little harsh. If they're in real trouble, have the Navy deliver a pallet of bootstraps and 5000 gallons of personal responsibility.