The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

Ultimately any country/state needs a variety of services, from utilities like water/sewage/electricity to emergency services like ambulance/fire/police to a military to defend what you've got from other countries. you also need things like roads, telecomms infrastructure and other things that have been built over decades/centuries in established countries.

You also need things like a foreign service to liaise with other countries so that the fate of your state isn't the same as the Thai SeaStedding adventure. Then you may also need things in the longer term like social services, pension funds etc to care for your citizens in the long term.

Those all need to be paid for somehow, and that somehow is taxes. A "low tax" environment inevitably has to skimp on those services somehow. I'd guess that these low tax environments intention would be to skimp on the services that richer people don't need in exchange for having those richer people pay less tax...

So I'm not really surprised by the comments in the article that they're having trouble getting "host" countries to buy into this, what's the upside for them? These low tax environments will obviously not provide good long term environments for workers (the low tax is likely to == low social care standards) so it'd seem likely they'll take in workers where it's suitable and ship them back out once they're not productive any more, back to the host countries they came from.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#9

Post by pixiemaster » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 7:18 PM UTC

the-dude wrote: post #7

52-6F-62 wrote: post #5

This is as suspicious and creepy to me as the unbridled control Alphabet sought with Sidewalk Labs’ Toronto experiment.

We have corporations as big or bigger as countries. The class war has ended. What are we going to do?

Mad Max was not supposed to be an instruction manual.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#10

Post by 52-6F-62 » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 7:19 PM UTC

the-dude wrote: post #7

52-6F-62 wrote: post #5

This is as suspicious and creepy to me as the unbridled control Alphabet sought with Sidewalk Labs’ Toronto experiment.

We have corporations as big or bigger as countries. The class war has ended. What are we going to do?

I certainly hope it’s not cede all control in one swoop to a couple of rich guys who think they know what’s best for everyone.

Im all for experimenting. I’m not for handing over local legal power to a corporation in one fell swoop because they promise to pay for my taxi as long as I’m in their good books.

No—the immediacy and totality they’re pursuing is the thing that bothers me. Little compromise seems to be offered. They seem to think like vey corporations do—they should be able to “just buy it”. I don’t like that. Not everything is for sale.