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View Full Version : For Libertarian Utopia, Float Away on ‘Startup’ Nation




jct74
06-01-2014, 08:50 PM
For Libertarian Utopia, Float Away on ‘Startup’ Nation

By Edward Robinson
May 30, 2014 12:00 AM ET

http://www.bloomberg.com/image/i7kKrktqVwK8.jpg


As dawn breaks over the Gulf of Fonseca, southeast of El Salvador, Patri Friedman sets out for a jog. He trots past domed hothouses filled with fruit trees and feels the sidewalk sway gently underfoot as a tugboat chugs by with a floating apartment building in tow. The year is 2024, and Friedman lives on a so-called seastead, a waterbound city of some 1,000 people who produce their own food, their own energy and -- most important -- their own laws.

That’s the dream that Friedman, a libertarian software engineer at Google Inc. (GOOG) and the grandson of Nobel Memorial Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman, is working to make a reality. As Bloomberg Pursuits will report in its Summer 2014 issue, Friedman is chairman of The Seasteading Institute, an Oakland, California–based group financed with $1.2 million in seed money from PayPal Inc. billionaire Peter Thiel.

The five-year-old organization is pursuing an ambitious aquatic mission: to develop floating microcountries that will dwell in international waters with the same sovereign status enjoyed by cruise ships. Think secessionist, do-it-yourself nation building meets the 1995 post-apocalyptic science-fiction stinker ‘Waterworld.’

This isn’t the mother of all tax dodges. (Moving to Cyprus is a lot less of a lift than building your own Atlantis.) Friedman and fellow traveler Thiel are after something more audacious. Settling on the sea offers a way to opt out of an overregulated society, Friedman says, and invent new forms of governance that stoke innovation.

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read more:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-30/for-libertarian-utopia-float-away-on-startup-nation.html

Anti Federalist
06-01-2014, 09:01 PM
Uh boy...this again.

Look, I hate to burst everybody's bubble, but if you think landlubbers are overregulated, you have not seen a thing until you start looking at all the regulations you will have to comply with for a project like this.

The sea has become, in the last thirty years, a UN/NWO prison.

You will not make a move with something like this without being in compliance with a barge load of IMO/UN regulations, and will also be forced to comply with 24/7 real time tracking of the vessel's every move.

mad cow
06-01-2014, 09:19 PM
...and feels the sidewalk sway gently underfoot as a tugboat chugs by with a floating apartment building in tow.

Heh.Nice cartoon picture,though.I wonder how much that solar freaking sidewalk would sway during a class 3~5 hurricane.
I am convinced that none of these dreamers have ever spent any time on the ocean.

Buy an island.

jclay2
06-01-2014, 10:09 PM
Wouldn't it be better to just set up a secret mine in the mountains and start a new race of dwarfs?