The world of libertarian thinking is a bewildering but entertaining one. It is necessary to distinguish between two groups: the respectable thinkers who have a positive view of human nature; who believe that we flourish as long as we are given ‘freedom’ (It is thoroughly at odds with my perspective though: yes, people need freedom ‘to’ do things, but they also need freedom ‘from’ oppression, which necessarily means restrictions on others freedom ‘to’ oppress others). In this guise, libertarianism is a credible and equal ideology even if it is one most of us disagree with.
But then there are the ‘loony libertarians’. These are the people who are paranoid about The Government, who use Liberty Dollars and BitCoins because they think that central banks are out to get them, and tend to have an unhealthy fixation with survivalism, which will come in useful when The State abandons its people in some far-off national emergency in the future. These people are always busy working on some surreal scheme for ridding society of organised government. In all fairness, there is considerable ingenuity behind some of these systems: making a currency work without a reserve or a central bank to organise it is often an impressive feat of logic and technical wizardry.
To that end, I was stunned by news of plans by the SeaSteading Institute to construct floating townships, sea-based towns with ‘hubs’ for shops and food stores, surrounded by a honeycomb-like structure of floating houses, equipped with solar panels and seawater distillers. Households would be able to join or float away from these communities as and when they feel like it. These SeaSteads would set up in international waters and would claim the right to govern themselves.
The idea is that SeaSteads, the first of which is seeking hundreds of people to invest over £100m each to construct, would then act as libertarian oases, in which taxation, government and poor people are all distant threats that do not trouble these glorified rigs. And here the practical problems begin to stack up. What if somebody has a medical emergency? How will each SeaStead protect itself from piracy? And of course, how does one prevent them becoming a centre of criminal activity without having some degree of government?
The SeaSteading Institute says it wants to build communities that can flourish on experimental political systems without ‘international’ interference. I say that that’s exactly what they should be able to do. We cannot have the global super-rich abandoning the rest of us en masse to live in pockets of law-free luxury: they can do enough of that already! SeaSteads would allow an elite to act with absolute ‘freedom’ whilst undermining the interests of the other 7.1999 billion people.
A SeaStead
But I am a democrat, and if a people want to form an independent nation, then that is what they should be allowed to do: but that means a SeaStead would be treated in exactly the same way we would treat Belgium or Kazakhstan. They would have no military protection from our governments, would be subject to any trade barriers that apply to other countries, and any people emigrating to such SeaSteads would have it made clear to them that they could not enjoy any form of protection from the government of their previous nation.
If SeaSteads ever make it off of the drawing board and onto the sea, they will end in either bloodshed, economic failure, or a betrayal of the principles that they are meant to enshrine. In any case, it is a social experiment that it would be futile to attempt to stop, so all the world can do is create the conditions in which it can be done safely.
