Posted on 08/16/2011 11:28:05 AM PDT by Freeport
Pay Pal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine.
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. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch--free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be "a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons."
"There are quite a lot of people who think it's not possible," Thiel said at a Seasteading Institute Conference in 2009, according to Details. (His first donation was in 2008, for $500,000.) "That's a good thing. We don't need to really worry about those people very much, because since they don't think it's possible they won't take us very seriously. And they will not actually try to stop us until it's too late."
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I’ve already seen Waterworld.
Cool. I can move there and start a pirate radio station.
Wait a minute...
Post of the thread. LOL!
you sir..... are living my dream. Live well my friend
Who’s to say that stealing is immoral therefore illegal?
So any bets on which flavor kool aid is used at the end of this utopian experiment?
It’ll be like Terra Nova/Falling Skies on the water.
If radical feminists did it to provide abortions for the Irish, the same model can be used to SAVE lives for all who want to.
Hook up a hospital ship to the floating island and medical evacuation choppers to bring in people denied care in the United States and/or European countries, and they’d have medical services for their own people and U.S. customers.
What a brilliant idea!!
Mothballed Cruise ships and military hospital ships re-purposed as CARE ships.
“without the moral codes of any existing place” does not equate to “no moral codes at all”
The Libertarian moral code is that people should be allowed to do whatever they want with their own bodies, but not harm anybody else. Hence, drug use, prostitution, gambling, etc. are moral (if stupid personal choices) while murder, assault, robbery, rape, fraud, etc. are immoral.
No, thanks, too dangerous...
More like “The Lord of the Flies” than “The Admirable Chrichton.”
As their own country, they could simply buy a small nuclear reactor from Toshiba or whoever. A 200MW plant would provide all the power needed for 100,000 people plus desalination of water and hydrogen production for boat fuel. Such a nuke plant would cost about half a billion.
The $1.25 million dollars from this one investor is simply to fund studies. Actual buy-in by residents of a few hundred thousand dollars each would provide funding of $20-$50B to actually build a city-state on the water.
The bigger issue is that the existing governments of the world don’t want any more new nations. Decades ago somebody staked a claim to an unclaimed sea mount in the south Pacific. He then had barges deliver rock to bring it above sea level and start expanding it. The king of Tonga sent his marines to invade it and annex it as Tongan soil, then immediately let it erode away to nothing again. Something similar happened to a previously unclaimed island off the coast of Italy.
To make this work, you have to have friends in the bigger countries and an outrageous amount of defense compared to your size to discourage the smaller countries and pirates. It would be easier to quietly buy up enough real estate on a tiny island like St. Kitts & Nevis to change the laws to suit you while retaining the alliances with other existing governments.
Good ideas.
Although previous attempts to build up a new island from the ocean floor and declare a country have gotten hostile reactions from already established neighbor countries.
St. Kitts & Nevis has less than 50,000 people. If 100,000 like-minded new people became citizens there, they could pretty much change the laws to whatever they liked. Getting the current citizens to allow that is the problem, but with enough new money accompanying the new citizens, it should be possible.
Especially if the new country accepted that doctors do they best and don’t allow lawsuits for medical failures.
Think how inexpensive medical care could be if doctors were not highly taxed, didn’t need large staffs to deal with insurance, and didn’t need to practice defensive medicine or pay for malpractice insurance. Maybe 30% of what it costs now in the USA.
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