No taxes. No welfare. Welcome to libertarian paradise island
ft.com
ft.com
I'm guessing that if I go there and start a business dumping waste on the island (which would be very profitable for me, it is increasingly costly to get rid of waste in most countries because of the stringent regulations) the people there would have to learn what taxes and regulations are for.
Exploiting distrustful people is the biggest industry there ever was unfortunately, including causing them to become distrustful, uncertain, isolated. It's how terrorists are made. It's how voters who vote for political extremism are made.
Ironically all of this would only work at scale, 500 people on a tiny island would be harder to control, I'm guessing due to their closeness, or quality of their interactions. You could play them against other communities, but not against each other. We have a lot of brain stuff to ensure the viability of small communities. It's all built-in, taken care of. The problems only start at scale, when everyone is isolated. You have to be inventive at scale.
The key to all this is if you have rights to where you are dumping/storing waste.
If you own the land and aren't damaging others, then you get to do it.
If you dump on someone else's property, they might shoot you.
Then entire selling point of libertarianism is that the opinions of others are irrelevant because there it minimal government power.
Beautifully put. It should be on a t-shirt.
But then, the very concept of a "right" is defined by mutual agreement. Who is to say what "rights" you do or don't have?
It is a contract and can't be whittled down or imposed on by public opinion. If own the rights to land, you can do with it what you want. If you want to put a garbage dump next to a playground, that is their problem if you aren't physically hurting them.
Libertarians absolutely believe in laws that uphold rights, and legal precedent describing how rights interact.
I ask because dumping waste could potentially be "not hurting others" in an immediate sense, but still e.g. contaminating the dump area.
The need for sophistication is obvious. Protecting your land is an easy case, but wouldn't you want to protect your future interest too and have a say in what I'm allowed to do on my own land, if that is something that could permanently damage the ecosystem in the long run. Or if I start selling unsafe, addicting products, the libertarian approach would be to let everyone decide for themselves, and subsequently fend for themselves. But isolated people are more suspectible to manipulation, and children too, everyone can be. The libertarian approach would be to leave people behind in the name of self-governance.
The question isn't even should self-governance be our goal, the question is whether it can exist at all. It's kind of an oxymoron, because nobody can protect their rights just by themselves. Building a trust infrastructure is perhaps more important.
Fair argument, but mostly a strawman against peaceful progress.
Call it “nonviolence”. Define the broad goal of civilization as eliminating coercion, and these experiments seem useful.