2009-04-28 The right floats off to Neverland. No girls allowed!

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Excerpt

The inauguration of Barack Obama has occasioned an outbreak of separatist posturing on the right, most of it fundamentally insincere, all of it petulant and juvenile.

For example, on April 6, a week before Rick Perry publicly contemplated the secession of Texas, Patri Friedman, the grandson of the free-market fundamentalist economist Milton Friedman, published an online manifesto in the libertarian Cato Institute's Cato Unbound, calling on libertarians to give up on democracy in the United States and ... move into San Francisco Bay.

"Democracy is the current industry standard political system, but unfortunately it is ill-suited for a libertarian state," Friedman writes. For one thing, "at most 16 percent of people have libertarian beliefs." Yup, that could be a problem. Friedman concedes: "Libertarians are a minority, and we underperform in elections, so winning electoral victories is a hopeless endeavor."

The solution? Create a new country as tiny and insignificant as the libertarian minority itself. Friedman explains why he and a few others founded the Seasteading Institute: "Seasteading is my proposal to open the oceans as a new frontier, where we can build new city-states to experiment with new institutions. This dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for forming a new government, because expensive though ocean platforms are, they are still cheap compared to winning a war, an election, or a revolution." Can't argue with that.

In addition: "A lower barrier to entry means more small-scale experimentation. Also, the unique nature of the fluid ocean surface means that cities can be built in a modular fashion where entire buildings can be detached and floated away. This unprecedented physical mobility will give us the ability to leave a country without leaving our home, increasing competition between governments." I for one can't wait to see the bidding war for Patri Friedman's loyalty between Atlantis and Lemuria.

...

Patri's Seastead Institute has received funding from Paypal founder Peter Thiel, who also funds the Methuselah Foundation, which seeks to end aging and make everyone immortal. In a companion essay on April 13 on Cato Unbound, Thiel endorses Friedman's rejection of democracy: "I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual [!]. For all these reasons, I still call myself 'libertarian.'" He goes on to say that "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." Why is democracy incompatible with freedom? According to Thiel, one problem with democracy is that women have the right to vote: "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women -- two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians -- have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron." What could more beautifully illustrate the pubescent male nerd mentality of the libertarian than Thiel's combination of misogyny with the denial of aging and death? We had a nice John Galt libertarian paradise in this country, until girls came along and messed it up!

Commentary

Is this a reasonable interpretation of Thiel's piece, or is it quoting out of context? The Seasteading idea seems quite interesting, although it does have the obvious flaw that it would initially be quite expensive and would have to be developed extensively before it could become anything but a toy for the rich -- but when all the fertile areas of Earth are pretty well occupied or off-limits, that is going to be the situation for any effort to open new frontiers.

Lind's piece seems unnecessarily dismissive and somewhat cherrypicked, but further exploration of Seasteading's long-term goals seems warranted.



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