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The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

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Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#191

Post by chucksmash »

Matticus_Rex wrote: post #170
fourthark wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ideology just happens to align so well with the interests...

Not really -- most business lobbyists are looking for various forms of corporate welfare. They want special treatment for their business/industry, or barriers to entry that prevent competitors from getting a foothold. Yeah, low regulatory barriers can help a whole industry, but why do you think many big companies lobby in favor of regulations? Big businesses can handle regulations way better than small companies (see…

> Deregulation is an even playing field, so it's a tough sell to say that that's just self-interest.

Just because deregulation doesn't give you a leg up against competitors within your industry doesn't suddenly remove self-interest as a motive. Price collusion doesn't help you vis-a-vis your competitors either but it's certainly done in self-interest.

If everybody in the economy makes 10% more in nominal terms but output remains the same, nobody is better off in real terms. The industry being deregulated is just a subset of the economy though! If getting rid of a regulation makes participants in an industry which is only 2% of the economy do 10% better in nominal terms while output remains unchanged, those participants are coming out ahead in real terms by capturing a bigger piece of the economic pie.

One need resort to neither altruism nor high minded ideals to explain such an action, self-interest still suffices.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#192

Post by rixed »

Matticus_Rex wrote: post #101
nickpinkston wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt you've done the research I have on this, so I'll leave it as an exercise to you and readers here to read my links, critiques of them, and draw your own conclusions. Also, I'm not saying everything Koch's touch is all wrong, but you can usually trace it back to self-interest whether directly or as cover. They do a lot of focus grouping to get from, for instance: "taxes are wrong" --> "don't build expensive pub…

Thanks to my past life working in the libertarian movement, I personally know a lot of the people written about in these conspiracy theories, and have been previously accused of being a paid Koch shill with nefarious motives for expressing my genuine (research-based!) opinions on what I think is best for society. I've met some self-interested people on the establishment Republican lobbying side, but almost none of th…

Ideology works because it is genuine. When it is said that some idea prevails because it benefits some group (== it is an ideology), it does not imply that the group does not genuinely believe in it.

Usually, political leaders are selected among those who truly believe and have fewer personal benefit (by those who believe less but benefit more), but that's not always the case, and ultimately that doesn't matter. What story we tell ourselves (how genuinely we believe) is not very relevant at the end of the day, for we do not make a living in the world of stories (but for martyrs).

So one must be very cautious, when reasoning about society (or anything really), each time ones line of arguments crosses ones self interest. How much genuinely we believe in what we benefit from is no better an argument than how much strongly an addict feel he needs his fix.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#193

Post by seibelj »

hannasanarion wrote: post #186
seibelj wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an aphorism that if you put 1000 libertarians in a room you will have 1000 definitions of what a "real" libertarian is. For me, the essence of libertarianism is about valuing the individual over the collective. This includes protecting individuals from the state by restricting state power, strong protection of private property, economic freedom, and allowing people the freedom to make their own decisions even if…

You know, there's a special name for a stateless society where people are allowed to own any amount of any thing and enter into any agreement. It's called "feudalism"

Common trope against libertarians, a super lazy no-thought argument. Feudalism is owning people which is clearly unethical. I'm not against government, I'm pro-freedom with a government that does the minimum possible to ensure a non-coercive society. Liberals take the absolute craziest position and say, "Durr that's what libertarians believe!" Completely ridiculous.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#195

Post by big_chungus »

mulmen wrote: post #124
big_chungus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some will, some won't. Just like on earth, new forms of government will evolve. What we _do_ know from our historical past is that small communities can do much better at self-government in most cases. It's always harder to screw over your neighbor than a random guy from the other side of the nation, and easier for the neighbor to get redress. More importantly, I don't think the possibility of a bad outcome ought to…

> Interesting thought: many suspect nations with frontiers flourish due to having an "escape valve". I am curious to see what an unlimited escape valve will enable. Can you expand on this? I think I understand the general implication but it’s not something I have considered before. If you have more thoughts/writing on this I’d like to ingest it. If I understand correctly the idea is “undesirables” can go to a place w…

Sure. The basic idea is that there are always people who just "don't fit in" to society at large. Those people can stay and cause trouble, can be imprisoned, or can go through the safety valve to go live where they won't harm others. It also gives people opportunity for advancement; think of the many stories of families going west to find a better life. It allows societies to preserve a degree of individualism and a shared goal of expanding into the great un-known. I'm dipping my toes into deeper sociological waters here than I'm entirely comfortable with, but there's a broader concept of a "safety-valve institution" that can be viewed as positively helping maintain order or negatively keeping oppressed masses from rising up (the class warfare folks start beating there drums around here). Some more interesting reading:

* http://www.ditext.com/shannon/shannon.html

* http://www.ditext.com/robbins/robbins.html

* https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/2716011

The obvious issue is that the treatment of Indians was unethical in the case of America, but space exploration might allow us to get many of these benefits of historical colonialism without genocide. I'll admit that I'm biased favorably towards this idea, as the frontier could, in some cases, be much closer to a libertarian utopia than a more heavily-organized society, but the up-side is that it provides options for those who want more and less state control.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#196

Post by dtwest »

arrosenberg wrote: post #93
darawk wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the fear of opt-in competition? Nobody is forcing anyone to move to these places. What they are is an opportunity to try out new governance modes. They might work or they might not. I find the hostility towards people trying new things to be strange and misplaced.

> Why the fear of opt-in competition? Nobody is forcing anyone to move to these places. What they are is an opportunity to try out new governance modes. It's a governance mode that was heavily used throughout the European colonial period and it resulted in the rape and theft of the local populations and underclasses of all the nations involved. When you put things in the proper historical context, the hostility is ra…

Since you're talking about proper historical context, it should be mentioned that none of the "nations" you speak of of were nation states in the modern sense. Many of the local populations were experiencing theft from their local warlords or kings or emperors before the Europeans came. Human history is full of people abusing power, it certainly wasn't first introduced by the Europeans, and it isn't unique to colonial style oppression.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#197

Post by freehunter »

BurningFrog wrote: post #121
munk-a wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I like embracing the statement "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" I think we really need to solve tax havens before we can make more places that can serve as them.

The simple solution to me is that a country offers good value for the taxes people pay to it. Then people and their taxable assets will gladly stay.

The problem is once you have the kind of money where tax havens become a priority, you no longer need anything the government might be able to provide. And then the game just becomes collecting as much money as you can and preventing that money from flowing through the economy by shuttling it out of the country.

The “good value” should hopefully be a well functioning nation full of healthy and happy people. Unfortunately that’s not the goal of most people with that kind of money.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#198

Post by freehunter »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #183
TimTheTinker wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The New World was a bleak dystopia for a few hundred years That's a bit of an overstatement. I expect if that were true, people wouldn't have kept on coming.

You're disregarding the extremely large number of people who were more or less forced to travel to the new world. Add up the slaves taken there, people sentenced to be sent there for crimes, people who had to leave their home country or starve and people who had to leave their home country or be murdered and you start to get a pretty large number.

Exactly. A large chunk of the population was forced to American against their will, and a large chunk of the people who chose to go to America only survived because of the labor of the people who were forced to be there. Claiming success on the back of slave labor isn’t something that’s super popular these days.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#199

Post by freehunter »

larnmar wrote: post #147
rozab wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The New World was a bleak dystopia for a few hundred years. Preserving the Earth is a better option than colonising other planets, although less sexy.

Colonising other planets is a lousy idea; at the very best you could at massive expense colonise Mars, but it would be (a) almost certainly worse than Earth and (b) only s doubling of our resources. Orbital habitats, formed by disassembling the moon, on the other hand, can give us vastly more habitable area than available on Earth, and the environment can be engineered to be better than Earth ever was. Recently I’ve…

That exact argument could be made against disaster recovery data centers. Why bother building a new data center and buying two servers when you could just have one and save tons of money?

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#200

Post by Alupis »

X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #157
HaloZero wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the UN will get on you. While this isn't an issue for some random warlord in Africa if you're a tiny island who still wants to operate within the world you're still fucked.

The UN doesn't have an army

No, but it's members do.

And some of those members aren't afraid of using them, or their Navys, or Air Forces...

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