Exit, Voice, and Liberty

There’s been some interesting, and heated, debate in the libertarian blogosphere about the importance of democracy to freedom. Will Wilkinson suggests that since charter cities (and presumably seasteads) are undemocratic, they might allow rulers of authoritarian regimes to reap the benefits of high economic growth without giving their subjects “real freedom.” I think Will’s point [...]

Roger Douglas Supports Competitive Government

The architect of New Zealand’s free-market reforms of the 1980s now advoctates an end to the geographic monopoly of local councils: Sir Roger Douglas wants ratepayers to be able to shop around for the best local council, saying that being able to defect to one nearby even if they do not live there will invoke the [...]

Customer-Owned Protection Agencies

I suggested yesterday that protection agencies which credibly commit to not joining any nascent cartel are likely to attract more customers than those which don’t, potentially nullifying Cowen and Sutter’s critique of market anarchism. One obvious possibility is customer ownership of protection agencies. Cowen makes this suggestion in the final paragraph of his 1992 paper: [...]

Democracies Never Compete

There’s been a lot of interesting discussion prompted by Patri Friedman’s Folk Activism essay (my thoughts here) and Cato talk. I particularly enjoyed this from Patri’s father David (HT: Paul Walker) and this from C.J. Trillian. One assumption which hasn’t to my knowledge been questioned is that seasteading will force existing land-based governments to better [...]

Technology versus Ideology

Patri Friedman has an excellent essay at Cato Unbound (HT: Eric) arguing that libertarian activists are largely wasting their time by taking an advocacy approach. I deeply yearn to live in an actual free society, not just to imagine a theoretical future utopia or achieve small incremental gains in freedom. For many years, I enthusiastically [...]

Governments and Seasteads

Eric makes a good point in the comments: The problem with meddlesome preferences on seasteads would be that Iran can always afford to spend more on punishing a Theo Van Gogh than a seastead can spend on protecting him. I think if we consider the long-term dynamics of a world with both seasteads and land-based [...]

Seasteading and Sects

We should expect sects – cohesive groups which instil extreme preferences on their members in order to ensure commitment – to be more prevalent under anarchy than under a state. Eric Crampton and I make this argument here. From the abstract: Using insights from the economics of religion, we argue that anarchy is more likely [...]

Some Thoughts on Seasteading

Seasteading is clearly awesome and one of the most important ideas of our time. My feeling is that while it won’t produce quite the utopia some might imagine, it will be a significant boon to human welfare. I worry, though, that the discussion is dominated by its cheerleaders, with those who don’t think seasteading will [...]