Imagine you run a small business in an area where a criminal organization runs a protection racket. “Nice shop here, shame if something were to happen to it.” So you pay. Someone tells you that they’ve never seen payment demanded from the homeless guy who sells pencils on the corner. Nor the shady guy who sells watches in the alley. And maybe not even from food trucks.
"Degree of indigenous occupation" is just another factor, like weather, to consider when deciding if it's feasible for outsiders to colonize a place that transportation tech has just made accessible.
Probably because most people's Utopias are blatantly unstable to human psychology. Quelle surpris.
But they would still be valuable. All the irritating socialists could 'eff off to one of their utopias and stop bothering me. At the very least we could point to the wreckage of their latest attempt at universal brotherhood....
Earth has fantastic tourism resources, once you overcome your crippling agrophobia of being outside without a suit. Will trade for your belt resources.
No; I think this misses the point entirely. Seasteading is about lowering the cost of entry to a polity via the ability to form a novel one under free association. It has nothing - nothing - to do with specific policies (oh, yeah, immigration, topic of the day, very clever...).
The world has a massive undersupply of different polities.
You have a few score of social democracies in various shades of taxation, a roughly equal number of functioning Asian autocracies, a smattering of traditional / pre-modern holdouts, and a hundred or so despotic messes. Big choice...not.
Where are the Miniarchist states? The Syndicalists? The Communists? The corporate states? The pure anarchists? The neo-reactionaries? The green primitivists? The plutocracies? The theocracies? Nowhere. Because land is finite and the frontier for state formation is closed. We have a dysfunctional polity market, with people trapped in states which don't share their ideals or kin.
I think the Steelman version is lowering the entry costs to the market for statehood.
Many of the most onerous taxes and regulations happen at the Federal level. Since those still apply if you move to New Hampshire, there's as much incentive to move there as there would be to a seastead.
Entrepreneurs widely fear imprisonment for innocent business acts? That would be serious indeed! But you'd think there would be journalistic exposes, etc.
Given the very large expenditures that seasteaders will need to put into defense, I suspect their taxes won't be low.
But taxation is not high enough (IMHO) in Western countries today to make exodus worthwhile.
In 1971 marginal income tax rates reached 98% in the UK. At that rate moving to a country with 10% marginal taxes represents a potential increase of 45x in post-tax income. At 90% the factor is 9. Those seem worth moving for.
But at 45% or so, you're looking at a factor of only 1.6 (0.9/0.55).
It's the maddening, soul-destroying, bottomless pit of unfathomable rules upon rules, hundreds of thousands of pages of them, constantly changing, expanding, and being reinterpreted, uncomprehendible by any hundred people, endlessly hanging like a sword of Damocles over ones' life work, forever threatening ignominy, prison time, and the loss of all that one has built, that chafes.
Perhaps the "steelman" version of the seasteading idea is that there is one particular set of regulations -- migration restrictions -- that
(1) some people think is reducing world GDP by ~50%(2) can't be relaxed by communities within a nation, and(3) nations don't seem motivated to enforce on third parties
So just maybe there is a trillion dollar bill lying on the sidewalk for someone who can find a sufficiently large industry that can be moved to the oceans and can benefit enough from a global hiring pool to make up for the extra costs of making it float. Medicine? Elder care? Something that looks like the current cruise ship business, but much, much bigger, that needs to bring cheap and high productivity labor together physically.
Once "seasteaders" have a 13 digit GDP, they will have plenty of resources to defend themselves. Of course, they need to solve a coordination problem to do that, and maybe that's where novel coordination mechanisms could come in. In solution space, where they belong, rather than as a goal in and of themselves.
Oh yes, I forgot to mention this... the movie wasn't especially seaworthy either (i.e., a poor return on the investment): https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
Yes, it works very well against colonizing the new world when the possibility first appeared, i.e., in 1000 AD when Leif Erikson and the Vikings made it to Newfoundland. It took a half millennium before the technology and economic incentives developed to make permenant settlement feasible.
The Free State project actually looks pretty successful to me, all things considered.
>This February, though, at a Manchester Radisson packed with political journalists in town for the key presidential primary, the project’s leaders announced they’d hit their target and officially “triggered the move.” Since then, according to early movers, new Free Staters have arrived at an unprecedented rate—six times the usual number of move-ins.
If they get 20K people to move to a state of 1.3M, that's 1.5% of the population. Less than half of those 1.3M are voters. So 3% of the voting population. That's nontrivial. They've already put a double-digit number of people in the state legislature.
Anyway, based on this post it sounds like Robin is part of the complacent class: http://learn.mruniversity.c...
"Degree of indigenous occupation" is just another factor, like weather, to consider when deciding if it's feasible for outsiders to colonize a place that transportation tech has just made accessible.
But most taxes don't go on defence! A 10% defence budget, even a 5% one, goes a LONG way for a state....
The Amerindians found it profitable to colonise the new world.
Seriously, the Vikings would probably have stayed and (slowly) prospered if the land wasn't already occupied by hunter-gatherer competition.
Probably because most people's Utopias are blatantly unstable to human psychology. Quelle surpris.
But they would still be valuable. All the irritating socialists could 'eff off to one of their utopias and stop bothering me. At the very least we could point to the wreckage of their latest attempt at universal brotherhood....
People like you trivialise the very real hazards of dihydrogen monoxide.
Earth has fantastic tourism resources, once you overcome your crippling agrophobia of being outside without a suit. Will trade for your belt resources.
No; I think this misses the point entirely. Seasteading is about lowering the cost of entry to a polity via the ability to form a novel one under free association. It has nothing - nothing - to do with specific policies (oh, yeah, immigration, topic of the day, very clever...).
The world has a massive undersupply of different polities.
You have a few score of social democracies in various shades of taxation, a roughly equal number of functioning Asian autocracies, a smattering of traditional / pre-modern holdouts, and a hundred or so despotic messes. Big choice...not.
Where are the Miniarchist states? The Syndicalists? The Communists? The corporate states? The pure anarchists? The neo-reactionaries? The green primitivists? The plutocracies? The theocracies? Nowhere. Because land is finite and the frontier for state formation is closed. We have a dysfunctional polity market, with people trapped in states which don't share their ideals or kin.
I think the Steelman version is lowering the entry costs to the market for statehood.
Many of the most onerous taxes and regulations happen at the Federal level. Since those still apply if you move to New Hampshire, there's as much incentive to move there as there would be to a seastead.
Entrepreneurs widely fear imprisonment for innocent business acts? That would be serious indeed! But you'd think there would be journalistic exposes, etc.
Given the very large expenditures that seasteaders will need to put into defense, I suspect their taxes won't be low.
But taxation is not high enough (IMHO) in Western countries today to make exodus worthwhile.
In 1971 marginal income tax rates reached 98% in the UK. At that rate moving to a country with 10% marginal taxes represents a potential increase of 45x in post-tax income. At 90% the factor is 9. Those seem worth moving for.
But at 45% or so, you're looking at a factor of only 1.6 (0.9/0.55).
It's the maddening, soul-destroying, bottomless pit of unfathomable rules upon rules, hundreds of thousands of pages of them, constantly changing, expanding, and being reinterpreted, uncomprehendible by any hundred people, endlessly hanging like a sword of Damocles over ones' life work, forever threatening ignominy, prison time, and the loss of all that one has built, that chafes.
Not the taxes.
And besides burdensome regulation there is burdensome taxation: surely seasteaders are expecting, or at least hoping for, a much smaller tax burden.
Perhaps the "steelman" version of the seasteading idea is that there is one particular set of regulations -- migration restrictions -- that
(1) some people think is reducing world GDP by ~50%(2) can't be relaxed by communities within a nation, and(3) nations don't seem motivated to enforce on third parties
So just maybe there is a trillion dollar bill lying on the sidewalk for someone who can find a sufficiently large industry that can be moved to the oceans and can benefit enough from a global hiring pool to make up for the extra costs of making it float. Medicine? Elder care? Something that looks like the current cruise ship business, but much, much bigger, that needs to bring cheap and high productivity labor together physically.
Once "seasteaders" have a 13 digit GDP, they will have plenty of resources to defend themselves. Of course, they need to solve a coordination problem to do that, and maybe that's where novel coordination mechanisms could come in. In solution space, where they belong, rather than as a goal in and of themselves.
Oh yes, I forgot to mention this... the movie wasn't especially seaworthy either (i.e., a poor return on the investment): https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
Yes, it works very well against colonizing the new world when the possibility first appeared, i.e., in 1000 AD when Leif Erikson and the Vikings made it to Newfoundland. It took a half millennium before the technology and economic incentives developed to make permenant settlement feasible.
The Free State project actually looks pretty successful to me, all things considered.
>This February, though, at a Manchester Radisson packed with political journalists in town for the key presidential primary, the project’s leaders announced they’d hit their target and officially “triggered the move.” Since then, according to early movers, new Free Staters have arrived at an unprecedented rate—six times the usual number of move-ins.
http://www.slate.com/articl...
If they get 20K people to move to a state of 1.3M, that's 1.5% of the population. Less than half of those 1.3M are voters. So 3% of the voting population. That's nontrivial. They've already put a double-digit number of people in the state legislature.
Anyway, based on this post it sounds like Robin is part of the complacent class: http://learn.mruniversity.c...
Does a similar argument also work against colonizing the New World?