I would love to see one of these Galt’s Gulches, and I love to see new ideas for advancing their success. Unfortunately, there are any number of excuses that existing governments could use to invade them. Maybe after force field shields are invented.
A sovereign nation of Texas would hardly be a libertarian utopia, but it would at least allow more people the option of voting with their feet. I’ve been following the Texit movement, and after going through the enormous amount of expense and effort to collect 140,000 signatures to put an advisory referendum to reassert Texas’s status as an independent nation on the Republican primary ballot, the Texas Republican Party is trying to weasel out of allowing it on the ballot as required, and seems to have the upper hand.
I mean, there’s plenty of islands in the middle of the Pacific and in the middle of the Atlantic not to mention the Isle of Man, which is actually quite close to the UK, they would probably love to have you join them. So why haven’t you done that? I absolutely do not mean to be a jerk , just to illustrate that while this is an extremely worthwhile conversation, It’s even more challenging (aka, full of subtle frictions) than it may appear.
The other issue I have come across, of course, is that successful/stable communities often times Do not want you to find them! This should not be underestimated. The way to get around that seems to be to have a successful internship/apprentice program that brings new blood in without assuming that the people need to buy in someway for their presence to be legitimated. And for them to be able to participate and contribute in a meaningful way, without needing to be a tourist or an investor or in someway related.
Great article, thank you. Speaking for myself, Having spent time with lots of communities of people who have left in various ways, it can become very isolated and the waters can feel a bit stagnant. It’s not all glitter and disco balls (or even just clean, rainwater harvesting, and fresh composting toilets. It’s much more than that.). Look at the number of people who have attempted to form eco-villages in Costa Rica over the last 20 years. Not to mention many other places. Granted with advances in technology, it should become easier, right? Why didn’t all the crypto Bros successfully set up a utopia in Puerto Rico with less taxation? There’s a whole lot of opportunity cost that goes into leaving and a whole lot of friction that happens, friction that we don’t necessarily take into account, social friction, infrastructure, friction, cash flow, friction. I’ve spent most of the last 20 years looking for opportunities for exit, and still have yet to find very many good ones. Probably the best one is forming a community half based on fishing half the year in Alaska were northwest Canada. but nonetheless, the further you are from the beaten path of commerce in pop culture, it can get a bit lonely and stagnant pretty quickly. Depending on your psychology.
Lot of good stuff here. First let me thank you for allowing me to respond to your previous post in that open letter format. Writing from that perspective is helping me to flesh out that character in my stories. Anyway, I believe most of what it boils down to is control. Nothing can exist forever in its purest form, even freedom. That would be chaos. The scales are out of balance and I believe the only way forward is to create something outside of the lines that will still be here after the “tower falls” so to speak. It can be super simple and you don’t need to ask permission. Plant a garden, build a greenhouse, dig a root cellar, learn to can. ❤️
Yeah, I am pretty much of that mindset now too. Plan ahead. Build. Be ready when, as you say, the tower falls. I think collapse may end up being our best friend in the long run.
Me too. That is the premise of my story, at least part of it. I’m writing from the perspective of the “Hero” coming to the conclusion that the tower has to fall so we can rebuild, then teaming up with the devil (Luci) and his little brother MJ or The Man Jesus to rid the world of the parasite feeding off of us and preventing the events of Revelations to take place. It’s dying to get out of me. It starts before the Younger Drias impact and then fast forwards to WW2 and now.
lol fuck else am I gonna do? I know the story, so I’m practicing writing longer and longer pieces. I’ve always had a writers mind but I had a fucked up start and then kids young so I worked in the dirt to support them. I’m 41 now and I have found myself in an unusual situation, I need to make the most of it.
Excellent essay, IMO. And lots of good comments. It's all very encouraging.
Years ago the Libertarians had a vote to choose one state. Lots of Libertarians were then going to move there and vote in a libertarian state government. It was a total failure.
I think, sadly, that if the history of the Civil War taught us anything, it is that the U.S. federal government is willing to kill any number-- hundreds of thousands then and millions now-- of Americans to prevent them from being free of the U.S. federal government.
Forget any kind of publicly-known secession (Ryan McMaken at the Mises Institute is currently proposing/planning a kind of secession). The U.S. federal government has immense power, that it wants to keep and increase at any cost. Feds would probably try kill even a group that established in another country.
That leaves some kind of Distributed Nation, of the kind the essay discusses. A Nation-within-the-Nation. One that stays under the leftists' radar for as long as possible.
The essay has some good ideas for such a system, Christopher Cook and Josh Ketry have some, too. But they seem too top-down. Whatever would work would, it seems to me, have to grow from the ground up. Start with a tiny seed and instantiate spontaneous order. Organic, not controlled. Evolve by trial and error. A system that creates freedom probably cannot be created by design or decree. It would have to emerge by self-organization. Emergent common law. Voluntary exchange based on evolving contracts. Something like that, IMO.
I am working a book now called “The Distributed Nation.” I have been thinking about this for over a year now. I will start releasing installments soon. I hope for lots of feedback!
There are lots of different pictures of what things might look like in the absence of involuntary governance—in fiction, in analysis, and in history. Naturally, it will not be paradise. There will be problems to surmount—there always are.
But it can work, and from a consequentialist standpoint, I believe it will be better. Aspects of it have already proved themselves in the real world, and we have learned a lot and developed a lot more helpful mechanisms and technologies in the modern era.
Even more importantly, though—it’s the right thing to do from a moral standpoint. The initiation of coercive force and the violation of consent are moral crimes, full stop. Involuntary governments do those things as a matter of their normal function. We will always begin with a baseline condition of strife and anger when we have that as our starting point, and consider it okay. A world that looks on those things as bad—even when done by government—has a chance of developing a better core ethos by which to function.
"You (or at least those who spew this garbage) are most certainly Bigots or maybe defacto or intentional Russian-Putin Assets. Or, maybe you are anti-Semitic Nazi, white, deplorable supremists ? All our DC Swamp assets, Leftist/Woke professors and high-tech billionaires must be enlisted to write long oh so sophisticated Papers (AI assisted) confirming these fact -- and establishing broad forums to combat incessant Disinformation to the contrary."
You see...the Global Elites (from decades of CIA trial-&-reiteration...are far ahead of all such "Secession(s)"
Perhaps our best Plan B option is to quietly relocate to a BRICS or Brics-friendly smaller country NOT so friendly to the Western Globalist Project...who already leave such expat or potential expat "closet-secessionists" alone (under far less tax and oppression)...to build their future(s). NOT saying it would be equally easy for all -- just Doable.
I have long thought of any other country as being undesirable because it is less predictable than ours. But that equation does seem to be slowly changing… Still, could we rely on a small BRICS-friendly country? Which one?
SEASTEADING: Stop thinking about it. Werner K. Stiefel, the CEO of Stiefel Laboratories created Operation Atlantis in the Caribbean; it was destroyed by a hurricane in 1972. Michael Oliver made 3 attempts. His Republic of Minerva in the South Pacific failed in 1972; his Abaco in the Bahamas failed in 1973; his Vanuatu island in the South Pacific failed in 1980.
You say you "want more data". This is the equivalent to delegating to a committee – a moral shift-off from confronting the mountainous data readily available now, favoring secession.
If you take a second look, you will see that my reference to "more data" was seeking replies from people who oppose secession. More opinions from people who feel as though we're "not allowed to leave."
But even if not—even if I were not quite where you thought I ought to be vis-a-vis secession—what possible purpose could it serve to use alienating language like, "This is the equivalent to delegating to a committee – a moral shift-off from confronting the mountainous data readily available"?
Great topic, Max. If you really want to wrap your head around this, people really have to do the grown-up thing and do a global tour of tax havens to better understand the implications--and the trade-offs, rather than just the political or economic questions. Because it's way more than the surface-level conversations that are required. For most Americans, we hate trade-offs compared to what we have here. And secondly, it's all about what you want and who you choose to surround yourself with, whether that's with friends and family, or if you decide to go it alone and look for new friends elsewhere. And that is a very thin crowd overall, and their average turnaround time in coming and going is generally 6 months to 3 years, tops. Hence the "lonely traveler" phenomena. The ultimate question in getting what is being implied in these conversations is whether or not people actually want to do the legwork, as I have, and whether or not you have the gall to renounce your US citizenship, assuming that you've lived it through the lens of the big picture, and you know the road ahead. Short answer is, the rest of the world is very mediocre compared to the US, and the trade-offs, by my read, aren't worth the price unless you have the financial resources to take up residency in two or more jurisdictions outside the U.S. Also in terms of recommended reading, "The End of the World is Just the Beginning" by Peter Zeihan, to understand some of the looming geopolitical challenges that are ahead that no one seems ready for with the coming collapse of the PRC. If you can put together a group of intelligent people who can move beyond theory and try to reverse-engineer the known data points, you might be able to come out ahead.
This is Christopher Cook's article, not mine. Indeed, I think he is not just talking about leaving the US, but separatism and self-determination within the US. Are you suggesting that unless I do a global tour of tax havens, I'm too juvenile to justify publishing Chris's article? Never mind that I have toured one of the most innovative new jurisdictions on the planet -- Prospera -- I am well travelled. Such travels include Switzerland and Monaco, and will include Luxembourg in the Fall. That said, if one is too literal-minded, which is not a grown-up thing, he won't be able to see possibilities for exit right here at home. In any case, I think the point here is more about the immorality of power blocking one's right of exit, than prescriptions for exit.
No, you're not too juvenile to post something. But there is a lot of "theorizing" that has been going on for well over 10 years on this topic., and not enough people going out into the world to see what's really there.
What will you do with the older gentleman who lives in one of your counties along the Canadian border, who does not wish to secede? Will you kill him? Will you forcibly seize his property and force him to leave?
The goal is to get things as close as possible to the individual—as close as possible to the categorical imperative that no one be subjected to any authority or transaction to which they did not explicitly consent.
The devolution from a government of a large territory to the government of a small territory is but a down-payment on that goal. Reduction of the size of the unit gets us closer to the goal, but not all the way there. It is an improvement, not a fix.
In a properly free society, people must be free to establish new polities in territory they own, and to invite people to join on mutually acceptable conditions. People must also be able to exit. And people must be free to remain on their own land and not join, or be subjected to, anything. Thus, a combination of panarchy and inarchy (see the post) are the likely combined outcome in a condition of genuine freedom. Obviously there are complications (which we can discuss); no situation is actually "ideal." But what we want to do is to maximize the rights to Establish, Join, Exit, Secede, and Remain (see: https://christophercook.substack.com/p/human-constitution).
So, if there is an opportunity for a smaller polity to form out of a larger, that is a step in the right direction. Maybe the polity would keep the sort of majoritarian political approach it inherited from its larger predecessor—in which case, it would function as such. No one would be killed or have their property forcibly seized. (Not sure why you chose such a truculent way to frame your question.)
Rather, people like me would then work towards the next goal—of eliminating the ability for majorities or nonconsensual systems to have any say whatsoever over the old man's life. That would ultimately require an anarchic condition. And in such a condition, any inarchic enclave that formed would not include his property if he did not wish to join that inarchic enclave, because he has the Right to Remain.
This is a complicated topic that takes some time to fully grasp. (I myself am learning new things every day.) I would be happy to stick with you to explain all the nuances as I understand them, but please understand that it will take time.
I’ll posit that there is no, nor has there ever been, that degree of freedom. If your ideal society was possible, I would not only let you leave, I would join you.
What does that have to do with the topic at hand? Of course it is.
This is where your argument tends to descend to “To make an omelette one must break some eggs.”
You began this article theorizing about a billionaire who builds an island in international waters. Who would care about that? But then, you’re populating counties within the continental United States. My point is simple. You cannot depend in any measure upon having 100% agreement in a populated land mass, any more than one state is all-blue or all-red. They aren’t.
My point was simply this: there was a time and place in the past in which people simply would not have believed that democracy was possible, had you described it to them. You, as a proponent of democracy, would simply not be able to convince them, because it was outside their knowledge and experience. And yet here we are, living in a world encrusted with democracies. Things are impossible until someone does them.
Now, the chances that they would start to understand what you were talking about would go up if you give them significant literature on the subject to study.
And in the same way here…before I studied the relevant literature on how it could be done (and examples of how it has been done, in part, in the past), I believed as you currently do. My mind was changed through study. Perhaps yours might be similarly changed, or at least partially intrigued, by similar study. LMK if you would like a suggested reading list.
“examples of how it has been done, in part...” does not sound intriguing.
The democracies that “encrust” our world have, pretty much, been subverted. I know of no reason to believe that your scenario could come to pass, or that it would not get subverted as well.
I’d suggest to you that if your way out was do-able then someone probably would have done it, in some form; not to say it has zero merit; but to say, the international organizations, the WEF, the WHO, the UN, will likely have a problem with it, long before the dust settles on your new nation.
Travel bans, embargoes, you would shortly find yourselves in a walled city with no means of self-support.
Let my people go!
I would love to see one of these Galt’s Gulches, and I love to see new ideas for advancing their success. Unfortunately, there are any number of excuses that existing governments could use to invade them. Maybe after force field shields are invented.
A sovereign nation of Texas would hardly be a libertarian utopia, but it would at least allow more people the option of voting with their feet. I’ve been following the Texit movement, and after going through the enormous amount of expense and effort to collect 140,000 signatures to put an advisory referendum to reassert Texas’s status as an independent nation on the Republican primary ballot, the Texas Republican Party is trying to weasel out of allowing it on the ballot as required, and seems to have the upper hand.
We are going to keep having these setbacks. We have to keep rolling.
Look at the left—from their viral creche at the Bastille to ruling the world today. Patient effort by generations.
We need to do the same.
Everything who takes over? And to which movies are you referring?
I mean, there’s plenty of islands in the middle of the Pacific and in the middle of the Atlantic not to mention the Isle of Man, which is actually quite close to the UK, they would probably love to have you join them. So why haven’t you done that? I absolutely do not mean to be a jerk , just to illustrate that while this is an extremely worthwhile conversation, It’s even more challenging (aka, full of subtle frictions) than it may appear.
The other issue I have come across, of course, is that successful/stable communities often times Do not want you to find them! This should not be underestimated. The way to get around that seems to be to have a successful internship/apprentice program that brings new blood in without assuming that the people need to buy in someway for their presence to be legitimated. And for them to be able to participate and contribute in a meaningful way, without needing to be a tourist or an investor or in someway related.
Great article, thank you. Speaking for myself, Having spent time with lots of communities of people who have left in various ways, it can become very isolated and the waters can feel a bit stagnant. It’s not all glitter and disco balls (or even just clean, rainwater harvesting, and fresh composting toilets. It’s much more than that.). Look at the number of people who have attempted to form eco-villages in Costa Rica over the last 20 years. Not to mention many other places. Granted with advances in technology, it should become easier, right? Why didn’t all the crypto Bros successfully set up a utopia in Puerto Rico with less taxation? There’s a whole lot of opportunity cost that goes into leaving and a whole lot of friction that happens, friction that we don’t necessarily take into account, social friction, infrastructure, friction, cash flow, friction. I’ve spent most of the last 20 years looking for opportunities for exit, and still have yet to find very many good ones. Probably the best one is forming a community half based on fishing half the year in Alaska were northwest Canada. but nonetheless, the further you are from the beaten path of commerce in pop culture, it can get a bit lonely and stagnant pretty quickly. Depending on your psychology.
Maybe the key is to exit right where we are. I am going to be releasing installments of a book on that notion soon…
Interesting.
Lot of good stuff here. First let me thank you for allowing me to respond to your previous post in that open letter format. Writing from that perspective is helping me to flesh out that character in my stories. Anyway, I believe most of what it boils down to is control. Nothing can exist forever in its purest form, even freedom. That would be chaos. The scales are out of balance and I believe the only way forward is to create something outside of the lines that will still be here after the “tower falls” so to speak. It can be super simple and you don’t need to ask permission. Plant a garden, build a greenhouse, dig a root cellar, learn to can. ❤️
Yeah, I am pretty much of that mindset now too. Plan ahead. Build. Be ready when, as you say, the tower falls. I think collapse may end up being our best friend in the long run.
Me too. That is the premise of my story, at least part of it. I’m writing from the perspective of the “Hero” coming to the conclusion that the tower has to fall so we can rebuild, then teaming up with the devil (Luci) and his little brother MJ or The Man Jesus to rid the world of the parasite feeding off of us and preventing the events of Revelations to take place. It’s dying to get out of me. It starts before the Younger Drias impact and then fast forwards to WW2 and now.
Ambitious!
lol fuck else am I gonna do? I know the story, so I’m practicing writing longer and longer pieces. I’ve always had a writers mind but I had a fucked up start and then kids young so I worked in the dirt to support them. I’m 41 now and I have found myself in an unusual situation, I need to make the most of it.
Excellent essay, IMO. And lots of good comments. It's all very encouraging.
Years ago the Libertarians had a vote to choose one state. Lots of Libertarians were then going to move there and vote in a libertarian state government. It was a total failure.
I think, sadly, that if the history of the Civil War taught us anything, it is that the U.S. federal government is willing to kill any number-- hundreds of thousands then and millions now-- of Americans to prevent them from being free of the U.S. federal government.
Forget any kind of publicly-known secession (Ryan McMaken at the Mises Institute is currently proposing/planning a kind of secession). The U.S. federal government has immense power, that it wants to keep and increase at any cost. Feds would probably try kill even a group that established in another country.
That leaves some kind of Distributed Nation, of the kind the essay discusses. A Nation-within-the-Nation. One that stays under the leftists' radar for as long as possible.
The essay has some good ideas for such a system, Christopher Cook and Josh Ketry have some, too. But they seem too top-down. Whatever would work would, it seems to me, have to grow from the ground up. Start with a tiny seed and instantiate spontaneous order. Organic, not controlled. Evolve by trial and error. A system that creates freedom probably cannot be created by design or decree. It would have to emerge by self-organization. Emergent common law. Voluntary exchange based on evolving contracts. Something like that, IMO.
I am working a book now called “The Distributed Nation.” I have been thinking about this for over a year now. I will start releasing installments soon. I hope for lots of feedback!
There are lots of different pictures of what things might look like in the absence of involuntary governance—in fiction, in analysis, and in history. Naturally, it will not be paradise. There will be problems to surmount—there always are.
But it can work, and from a consequentialist standpoint, I believe it will be better. Aspects of it have already proved themselves in the real world, and we have learned a lot and developed a lot more helpful mechanisms and technologies in the modern era.
Even more importantly, though—it’s the right thing to do from a moral standpoint. The initiation of coercive force and the violation of consent are moral crimes, full stop. Involuntary governments do those things as a matter of their normal function. We will always begin with a baseline condition of strife and anger when we have that as our starting point, and consider it okay. A world that looks on those things as bad—even when done by government—has a chance of developing a better core ethos by which to function.
Right, exactly! I will take my chances with the minor chaos of intentional anarchy as opposed to the major terror of a state.
Bravo.
Thx ☺️
"You (or at least those who spew this garbage) are most certainly Bigots or maybe defacto or intentional Russian-Putin Assets. Or, maybe you are anti-Semitic Nazi, white, deplorable supremists ? All our DC Swamp assets, Leftist/Woke professors and high-tech billionaires must be enlisted to write long oh so sophisticated Papers (AI assisted) confirming these fact -- and establishing broad forums to combat incessant Disinformation to the contrary."
You see...the Global Elites (from decades of CIA trial-&-reiteration...are far ahead of all such "Secession(s)"
Perhaps our best Plan B option is to quietly relocate to a BRICS or Brics-friendly smaller country NOT so friendly to the Western Globalist Project...who already leave such expat or potential expat "closet-secessionists" alone (under far less tax and oppression)...to build their future(s). NOT saying it would be equally easy for all -- just Doable.
I have long thought of any other country as being undesirable because it is less predictable than ours. But that equation does seem to be slowly changing… Still, could we rely on a small BRICS-friendly country? Which one?
But also, while I would go in a heartbeat (if my wife agreed) if there were a reliable place to go, there is also something frustrating in the notion of ceding victory to THEM. (I wrote about that tension here: https://christophercook.substack.com/p/eivor-skyscrapers-in-this-moment-comanche)
A better plan B. In fact it should be plan A. Make a new system that can't be corrupted as easily as the ones we live under: https://joshketry.substack.com/p/help-lets-build-a-new-system-that
SEASTEADING: Stop thinking about it. Werner K. Stiefel, the CEO of Stiefel Laboratories created Operation Atlantis in the Caribbean; it was destroyed by a hurricane in 1972. Michael Oliver made 3 attempts. His Republic of Minerva in the South Pacific failed in 1972; his Abaco in the Bahamas failed in 1973; his Vanuatu island in the South Pacific failed in 1980.
NEW COUNTRY: Texas will secede, as already detailed for you, here: https://store.mises.org/Constitution-of-Non-state-Government-Field-Guide-to-Texas-Secession-P11264.aspx
You say you "want more data". This is the equivalent to delegating to a committee – a moral shift-off from confronting the mountainous data readily available now, favoring secession.
If you take a second look, you will see that my reference to "more data" was seeking replies from people who oppose secession. More opinions from people who feel as though we're "not allowed to leave."
But even if not—even if I were not quite where you thought I ought to be vis-a-vis secession—what possible purpose could it serve to use alienating language like, "This is the equivalent to delegating to a committee – a moral shift-off from confronting the mountainous data readily available"?
I might have said "THOSE WHO 'want more data' [etc.]"
In any case, my remarks – alienating or not – are aimed at the idea, not the person.
I write five days a week. There is bound to be some imprecise language here and there.
Great topic, Max. If you really want to wrap your head around this, people really have to do the grown-up thing and do a global tour of tax havens to better understand the implications--and the trade-offs, rather than just the political or economic questions. Because it's way more than the surface-level conversations that are required. For most Americans, we hate trade-offs compared to what we have here. And secondly, it's all about what you want and who you choose to surround yourself with, whether that's with friends and family, or if you decide to go it alone and look for new friends elsewhere. And that is a very thin crowd overall, and their average turnaround time in coming and going is generally 6 months to 3 years, tops. Hence the "lonely traveler" phenomena. The ultimate question in getting what is being implied in these conversations is whether or not people actually want to do the legwork, as I have, and whether or not you have the gall to renounce your US citizenship, assuming that you've lived it through the lens of the big picture, and you know the road ahead. Short answer is, the rest of the world is very mediocre compared to the US, and the trade-offs, by my read, aren't worth the price unless you have the financial resources to take up residency in two or more jurisdictions outside the U.S. Also in terms of recommended reading, "The End of the World is Just the Beginning" by Peter Zeihan, to understand some of the looming geopolitical challenges that are ahead that no one seems ready for with the coming collapse of the PRC. If you can put together a group of intelligent people who can move beyond theory and try to reverse-engineer the known data points, you might be able to come out ahead.
This is Christopher Cook's article, not mine. Indeed, I think he is not just talking about leaving the US, but separatism and self-determination within the US. Are you suggesting that unless I do a global tour of tax havens, I'm too juvenile to justify publishing Chris's article? Never mind that I have toured one of the most innovative new jurisdictions on the planet -- Prospera -- I am well travelled. Such travels include Switzerland and Monaco, and will include Luxembourg in the Fall. That said, if one is too literal-minded, which is not a grown-up thing, he won't be able to see possibilities for exit right here at home. In any case, I think the point here is more about the immorality of power blocking one's right of exit, than prescriptions for exit.
No, you're not too juvenile to post something. But there is a lot of "theorizing" that has been going on for well over 10 years on this topic., and not enough people going out into the world to see what's really there.
What will you do with the older gentleman who lives in one of your counties along the Canadian border, who does not wish to secede? Will you kill him? Will you forcibly seize his property and force him to leave?
Oh, wait. Majority rules, right?
The goal is to get things as close as possible to the individual—as close as possible to the categorical imperative that no one be subjected to any authority or transaction to which they did not explicitly consent.
The devolution from a government of a large territory to the government of a small territory is but a down-payment on that goal. Reduction of the size of the unit gets us closer to the goal, but not all the way there. It is an improvement, not a fix.
We might describe an "ideal" as I do in this post: https://christophercook.substack.com/p/what-kind-world-you-want
In a properly free society, people must be free to establish new polities in territory they own, and to invite people to join on mutually acceptable conditions. People must also be able to exit. And people must be free to remain on their own land and not join, or be subjected to, anything. Thus, a combination of panarchy and inarchy (see the post) are the likely combined outcome in a condition of genuine freedom. Obviously there are complications (which we can discuss); no situation is actually "ideal." But what we want to do is to maximize the rights to Establish, Join, Exit, Secede, and Remain (see: https://christophercook.substack.com/p/human-constitution).
So, if there is an opportunity for a smaller polity to form out of a larger, that is a step in the right direction. Maybe the polity would keep the sort of majoritarian political approach it inherited from its larger predecessor—in which case, it would function as such. No one would be killed or have their property forcibly seized. (Not sure why you chose such a truculent way to frame your question.)
Rather, people like me would then work towards the next goal—of eliminating the ability for majorities or nonconsensual systems to have any say whatsoever over the old man's life. That would ultimately require an anarchic condition. And in such a condition, any inarchic enclave that formed would not include his property if he did not wish to join that inarchic enclave, because he has the Right to Remain.
This is a complicated topic that takes some time to fully grasp. (I myself am learning new things every day.) I would be happy to stick with you to explain all the nuances as I understand them, but please understand that it will take time.
I’ll posit that there is no, nor has there ever been, that degree of freedom. If your ideal society was possible, I would not only let you leave, I would join you.
But it isn’t.
Do you believe that democracy (any system that uses voting, including a constitutional republic) is an improvement over monarchy?
What does that have to do with the topic at hand? Of course it is.
This is where your argument tends to descend to “To make an omelette one must break some eggs.”
You began this article theorizing about a billionaire who builds an island in international waters. Who would care about that? But then, you’re populating counties within the continental United States. My point is simple. You cannot depend in any measure upon having 100% agreement in a populated land mass, any more than one state is all-blue or all-red. They aren’t.
My point was simply this: there was a time and place in the past in which people simply would not have believed that democracy was possible, had you described it to them. You, as a proponent of democracy, would simply not be able to convince them, because it was outside their knowledge and experience. And yet here we are, living in a world encrusted with democracies. Things are impossible until someone does them.
Now, the chances that they would start to understand what you were talking about would go up if you give them significant literature on the subject to study.
And in the same way here…before I studied the relevant literature on how it could be done (and examples of how it has been done, in part, in the past), I believed as you currently do. My mind was changed through study. Perhaps yours might be similarly changed, or at least partially intrigued, by similar study. LMK if you would like a suggested reading list.
I don’t actually think so.
“examples of how it has been done, in part...” does not sound intriguing.
The democracies that “encrust” our world have, pretty much, been subverted. I know of no reason to believe that your scenario could come to pass, or that it would not get subverted as well.
I’d suggest to you that if your way out was do-able then someone probably would have done it, in some form; not to say it has zero merit; but to say, the international organizations, the WEF, the WHO, the UN, will likely have a problem with it, long before the dust settles on your new nation.
Travel bans, embargoes, you would shortly find yourselves in a walled city with no means of self-support.
Help us to defeat them. Instead.
Which sounds less possible, to you?
There is no "allowing" us. We just do it.
We need a place humans trust again to go problem solve in groups. That used to be Congress or Academia but all of these places have been corrupted.
Also, we should learn how to optimize problem solving in groups with high trust transparent systems, and Human Swarm Intelligence.
We have options right now without anyone giving us permission. Like this: https://joshketry.substack.com/p/help-lets-build-a-new-system-that
By “allow,” of course, I mean “not use the violence of the ballot or the bullet to stop us.”
LEADERLESS = very interesting!
So you would prefer more libertarian sci-if stories take place on Earth?
Sounds like a great story. I would read it!
Would I live underground? Only if I absolutely had to.