Too true: A country that sounds great on paper, but is really an infrastructure-free swamp that no-one actually wants to live in. It is indeed libertarianism at its finest!
This is why I can't respect people like Peter Thiel, he would rather take all the benefits he can accrue from a society he so loathes, but he refuses to live in any of the Libertarian communities that exist. What kind of person can't even stand up for their core beliefs? An unrespectable pile in my experience.
I know I will get downvoted for this comment, and I encourage you to respond.
[1] I'm excluding anarchist communities.
One of the biggest challenges that arises when the concept of true libertarian societies comes up is how the democratic governments of the world would respond. I think they'd be overly envious and embargo the libertarian societies. Of course, the democracies would try to justify this by arguing that, 'If you want to isolate yourself from us, then don't even bother trading with us'. However, this argument totally misses the point; secession and libertarianism don't advocate for protectionism, only free trade.
Nonetheless, I suspect there'll be a wave of secessionist movements that will take over the world in the 21st century. This is the only hope (or is it Hoppe) that anarcho-capitalism has.
Thats why I said the trading power is neccessery for governments to stomach the harsh reality : They get power from the commerce not the other way around.
The libertarian echo chamber produces some truly bizarre ideas.
Significantly redefining a word is one of the worst aspects of libertarianism (eg, the redefinition of "violence"), and it's done intentionally in order to confuse the issue and put other people offside.
How about giving some examples of these supposedly envied places, rather than just leave it to the imagination?
I'll refer you to an excerpt from 'Envy a theory of social behavior'.
'envy has played a large part in forming human society, and that, secondly, the role of envy often remains hidden'
Also
'socialism and democracy were put forward as ideas by members of society who were not able "to deal with their own envy"'
Not everything is about protesting in the streets. Besides, protest against what? Tons of people that want to live in a different way that what you suggest? The only real way would be to convince them...
A pragmatic, as opposed to batshit-crazy, person?
Standing up for what you believe the country/society in general should be run is not the same as creating some bizarro micro-community that is not an actual country and living there...
The same reason why people e.g. against racism don't go live on made-up non-racism communities, but try to make the community they live in less/no racist.
I do however disagree that creating new sovereign territories is bizarre and unwarranted. Thiel himself has partnered with Milton Friedman's grandson to establish the sea steading institute which is very commendable.
There is a real danger of the whole world turning socialist and communist before the inevitable collapse on it's own weight. Where would you run to if government turned against you? Where would you run if you were Snowden? If you look at the EU and UN, these are just signs of what's to come; one wolrd government that eventually collapses due to inherent inefficiencies.
I for one am really glad Brexit happened. More territories need to follow the same route.
Frankly I dont want a Libertarian US but 3189 micro countries each experimenting with different mixture of laws. May the best win. Everyone know big corporations are to be avoided but they fail to extend the argument to mega-states.
[1] Like everyone else. Libertarians are just honest enough to admit it.
The thing is, as a Libertarian you literally can't.
One principal idea is to live without coercion, but as long as you're part of a tax collecting state, you are to "share" part of the fruits of your labor with authorities you do not recognize or else...
Secondly, the rights and laws (such as really free speech or free contracts) are overridden (e.g., by hate speech, minimum salary, anti-discrimination laws, ...), so there is no way you can meaningfully establish a libertarian society within a current nation state.
Finally, there are other (possibly quasi-) monopolies (such as monopoly on violence, Taxi licenses ~ anti-Uber, Hotel Services ~ anti-AirBnB) that you cannot get rid of unless you get rid of the controlling entity.
Note the difference to e.g. communist societies where you can just start sharing everything (much like you might already be doing within your family).
Violence yes, monopoly no.
Depends on the jurisdiction, doesn't it? In some jurisdictions, judges are elected. In others they're appointed by representatives who are elected. At least I believe those are the common cases in democracies. (And there's another couple of assumptions.) Or am I misunderstanding? Wouldn't be the first time.
Currently and generally a single jurisdiction doesn't allow for competing courts.
In libertarian land everyone has (or is?) his own "jurisdiction" for his private property (and there is no public property). All other courts are defined in contracts.
Note the latter is the generalization of the former where entering other people's property entails an implicit agreement to the owner's terms (and jurisdiction if you will.)
So everyone can define his own abortion/marihuana/uber free zone at will and/or just rule out the public completely.
Often there is a misunderstanding that this entails a "free for all" but municipalities in today's sense would still exist and have their own laws / courts and the streets there would probably belong to a company consisting of a number of the municipality's inhabitants.
This doesn't mean that there is only one such company, so you can "choose your court" by walking the streets of company A and avoiding the streets of company B. Or you dislike them both and just move to some other town a few kms away.
Letting people choose their own court is a terrible idea. It's basically binding arbitration for the masses.
This, like most parts of Libertopia, is completely dependent on a robust reputation system. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to determine whether the proposed court is likely to be fair and impartial for your specific case.
If you can't find a single judge that you can both agree on, you basically become Hatfields and McCoys, and then the rest of the county pulls their own guns, and decides which gang gets to be out in public on which days of the week.
In a government court, jurisdiction is just assumed. In Libertopia courts, you can never skip that step. You also can't skip the part where the litigants post cash bonds to the court, to pay the judge and jury, and guarantee some of the judgment award.
Filing suit as plaintiff in your own court seems like a slam-dunk until you realize that no defendant with an IQ higher than broccoli would ever be insane enough to grant you jurisdiction to hear your own case against them. And they definitely wouldn't pay you to do that.
Turns out there are no courts that I feel are acceptable for resolving this dispute.
Having total freedom to do anything you want only works until other people exist.
And of course, there's also violence, just as today.
The original idea is to limit power. Now if you require an enforcer that is stronger than every entity in the system, the enforcer becomes part of the system. Then you need another enforcer that enforces stuff on the original one, ad infinitum. So you cannot ultimately enforce everything, not so today and not so in libertopia.
There are still solutions / mitigation mechanisms to this, and I'll just sketch a few:
- Embargos - fully legal, you just stop trading with the bad guy and revoke access to your property. The more people do it, the more expensive his life becomes. If the embargo is respected by enough people in the municipality, he'll lead an expensive, lone life with little to no access to food, health care, energy ... Note this is a current mechanism in international politics where there is no ultimate enforcer.
- Karmic violence - fully illegal, yet it was practiced throughout history to deal with perceived injustices, starting with killing Cesar, the plots to kill Hitler until today's violence between gangs. Each instance represents a failure of the enforcement system, still it is very common. Note this is equivalent to war in international politics.
- Coalitions: Groups of people embargoing or enacting karmic violence against a specified individual. Note this is again very common in international politics.
Just trade with someone else if you don't like that guy's court.
There'd most probably be an app for that ;)
Most things that hit the courts are not trade issues, for that matter.
No you aren't. Maybe you check this guy's reputation or you make a contract before you buy a property close to him. Good neighborhood contracts (I don't recall the name right now) are common international politics, see the original article. If the guy's a reasonable person, he'll want to resolve it as well. If he's a villain, you'll have supporters throughout your community because you won't be his first victim. Start your embargo if you want.
> Most things that hit the courts are not trade issues, for that matter.
They aren't today because municipality / state laws act like additional clauses to your contract even if they are not mentioned in the contract. But if you make this stuff explicit, many things become contract (not trade) issues.
There's btw no reason not to have a property that has exactly the same laws as the US today and allow people to enter it unless they disrespect the laws. The current system can live within a libertarian land, but not the other way round. Libertarian land is the more general one.
This solution is insane and will never work in real life.
You would have a hard time getting a job or obtaining credit without some demonstration that you can be responsible and individually accountable for your actions.
If your neighbor won't go to court, you have to weigh the consequences of possibly violent escalation. There is no cure for bad neighbors, with or without government-run courts.
Few people are willing to do pursue things on this level however. When more than one person gets involved, politics can easily enter the equation.
Personally, I find the libertarian philosophy a bit naive for that reason. The natural state of humanity is tribal in nature. "No rules" is a bit of a fantasy; eventually, some foundation will have to be established. Inevitably, people will disagree on this foundation.
Technical achievements aside (the blockchain will live on), Bitcoin actually is a great example of how something with somewhat idealistic libertarian underpinnings ended up turning into the usual tribal politics in the end.
Well, all libertarianism is based on ownership and contract law (plus some other stuff like homesteading as initial means to acquire ownership). So rules there are, they are just not forced unto someone.
Consider the opposite - maybe you are in favor of Uber or abortion or against taxation. Yet somehow your state assumes that you implicitly agree to everything the state mandates, such as laws and sharing the fruits of your labor.
You can think of Libertarianism as a way to have many many states instead of just a single one the size of the US. In this way, you can choose with your feet what rules you accept because you have a choice. And you have this choice without travelling thousands of miles and leaving your family, friends and job behind.
You can avoid Donald and Hillary by moving a few miles, you can avoid paying taxes or your personal nemesis law (like abortion) because you have a market of possible states (I'm simplifying here) and not just a single one.
Bitcoin is indeed a great example of Libertarianism (or rather the market) because if the BTC guys don't adapt to what people need, another crypto-currency will eventually take over. You now have a market of semi-anonymous currencies and that's not the problem but the solution to BTC's tribal politics.
The main problem I see with this vision is that, in order to achieve it, I feel that a large portion of humans would need to develop the ability to respectfully disagree with personal opinion differences, without resorting to conflict. This actually is difficult as it does not seem to be default human nature. Even Bitcoin showed this -- DDOS were reportedly used as a "weapon" against some of the forks.
I do agree that, whenever possible, it is a good idea to have some degree of state / municipal / etc. flexibility such that one can experiment with what works and what doesn't.
If we could do this, we wouldn't need libertarianism, or any other kind of -ism.