From Seasteading to Charter Cities

I’m immensily excited by all this. I found out about seasteading about a year ago when I was looking up some stuff about Milton Friedman. The idea seemed great, but too expensive and from the little I knew about the ship building industry, unlikely to happen in the near future. But I was really turned at the online March 2011 Agora I/O Unconference. Milton’s grandson Patri Friedman delivered a clear and thorough presentation on the idea and brought new light to it’s commercial viability in the nearer future. Charles Peralo has also recently made a couple of appearances to promote the concept. Perhaps the best thing about seasteading is that it’s immediately seen as being so silly it won’t possibly work. The best thing because it will keep it well off the state’s radar until it’s too late. Essentially it’s an experiment. To test the results of competing governments, starting from a point of zero regulation. And all taking place on the high seas! … See what I mean? Silly. And totally possible.

I can just imagine Alex Jones raving about how he’s discovered that the élite are building floating fortresses to live on while the rest of the planet is annihilated in the globalists final endgame… Nobody is going to give a shit about this idea. Except perhaps some creative entrepreneurs who see opportunities are to be had in a brand new free market zone.

So feeling mildly inspired by this, I then came across a video in my YouTube subscription feed. And this was the first time I heard about Charter Cities. There have been many attempts throughout history to create anarchic utopias. Auraville in India has been dubbed Divine Anarchy. But nothing has come close to providing the level of freedom the more hardcore laissez-faire types demand. While seasteading came very close, charter cities seem even closer. And Honduras is the immenent playground.

Paul Romer, an economist, strangely with no apparent connection to any Austrian Economics, has been working with the government in Honduras to establish the first Charter City. There will be several of them. 1000 square kilometers each. An annual fee will be paid to the Honduran state and another state acts as guarantor. Other than that, it seems the landscape is as open and blue sky as you could imagine from state intervention. Rumour has it Patri Freidman has “got” one of these charter cities.

You can find out more about these ideas at CharterCities.org, and for more on seasteading you can visite the Seasteading Institute.

But for now I’ll leave you with my 3 vital videos on the subject, including Friedman’s Agora I/O talk, t3hsauce‘s take on strategy for liberty and Romer’s TED-Talk presentation.

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