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The Road to Freedom by Lasse Birk Olesen Exclusive to STR October 20, 2006
As
the state gets more and more power over more and more parts of our lives,
the task seems nearly impossible and you might even feel like taking
the blue pill and quitting. However, what if only a small group of
devoted people could make a huge difference by building a libertarian
competition to the state? Not only would they be living in freedom
themselves, they would also be a living example of a flourishing
libertarian society to whoever might doubt the benefits of freedom. I have
examined the different roads to freedom in our lifetime and finally found
one that seems both realistic and attractive. Democratic The
most traveled road for those who try to attain political changes is of
course through the established democratic system. Whether you vote for the
main candidate who seems the least socialist or try to get votes for a
third party, the advantages and especially the disadvantages of the
democratic strategy remain the same. This
road has one big advantage: you can keep living where you live and you can
keep your work, your neighbors, your culture, and your friends. Of
course, the disadvantage is that 120
million people must want to break their chains. If you are as
optimistic as Jim
Davies, 100 libertarians will each year be able to convince another
100, who in turn will be able to convince another 100, and so on. After 21
years, 209 million libertarians will be the overwhelming majority in the I
believe that with so many people having a personal interest in increasing
government budgets, we have passed the point of no return and the
democratic strategy is very unlikely to succeed. Even if it can be done,
the process is so very slow, thus not favorable for liberty in our
lifetime. Free
State
Project The
Free State Project also works
within the democratic framework but makes use of the fact that voters can
move to other democratic units. The goal of the project is to get 20,000
libertarians to move to On
the other hand, is it worth sacrificing your house and living close to
your family and friends for this tiny advantage? After all, at the time of
writing, the FSP has only 7,300 members. Even if they reach their goal of
20,000, how big a difference will they be able to make in the If
a Free State Project should really make a difference, and not just turn
out to be a libertarian coffee club, the target state must be of such a
size that the arriving libertarians will play a large role, if not the
major one, in upcoming elections. Also, as the federal government gets
increasingly more powerful, the advantage of having libertarians governing
a state diminishes. This is why you would have to look outside of the The
larger a part of the population the libertarian newcomers make up,
however, the larger is the risk of the native inhabitants rejecting such
an enormous immigration. A lot of them will not at all be interested in
having a libertarian society and even more will fear a boost in
unemployment as the "foreigners take our jobs." Unfortunately,
it is still a widespread misunderstanding that the supply of work does not
follow the demand for work. The imminent risk of political regulation of
immigration makes Revolution A
few loads of Kalashnikovs, some artillery, and maybe even a few kamikaze
bombers should be more than enough to coup the state. The libertarian
revolution has succeeded. Many
people claim, like the founding fathers and Henry David Thoreau, that it
is not only man's right but also his duty to overthrow an unjust and
corrupt state. If so, I guess we can safely begin with the American one. The
problem is that the
power of any authority depends upon the consent of its subjects. We
already know too well that the vast majority of Americans believe that
government is the solution to our problems. That is, after all, what they
are told every single day of their lives. Without
widespread public support for overthrowing the government, a libertarian
revolution will inevitably end up like many other violent revolutions in
history: with rebellion, counter-revolutions and violent conflicts. As
Franklin Sanders wrote: If the current Put
a different way, the goal depends upon the means. If violent means are
used in order to reach the goal, then the goal will also be violent. If we
want a peaceful and libertarian society where all human interactions are
voluntary, then the means must be of the exact same nature. As Gandhi
said, "Our progress towards the goal is always in exact proportion to
the purity of our means. This method may appear to be long, perhaps too
long, but I am convinced it is the shortest." Thus,
the revolutionary strategy has the same disadvantages as the democratic
one: it requires widespread public support. When you eventually have this
widespread public support, the democratic way seems easier after all. See
also Voluntary
Resistance. Secession Why
not buy some small and uninhabited island and declare its independence
just as Americans did 230 years ago, or as Danish hippies did with
government property in the Seventies when they founded Christiania?
You will be completely self-determinant with no democratic opponents or
rebellious socialists. The
question is if whatever state that previously controlled the area will
invade it and demand to remain sovereign. While it is against the very
nature of the state to give up power voluntarily, politicians will not act
in ways that will deprive them of votes at the upcoming election. Thus,
the objective is to win over public opinion. By renouncing all government
handouts as health insurance, education, and protection in return for
nothing else but to live in peace, libertarians will seem harmless while
the intervening state will seem ruthless and totalitarian. Indeed,
if you ask people if they will allow libertarians to live in any way they
want to on an island, most of them have nothing against that. I once asked
Danish semi-communist Member of Parliament Rune Lund the same question and
even he saw no reason for the state to intervene. However, if the
secessionists are to be taken seriously, they cannot consist of eccentric,
tax-shunning millionaires alone (not that I can be said to be a
millionaire). It must be a broader group of ordinary people willing to
stand out and tell the world why they will not submit to the chains of the
government. No
matter what, however, you never know what the state might come up with and
you do have a serious problem when the entire forces of Leviathan are
assembled outside your door, demanding back the sovereignty of the state.
Furthermore, you have only scanty possibilities to enlarge the area as the
population grows. The next strategy in my examination avoids both
problems. Make
new land While
some maintain that a legitimate secession requires you not only to buy
land from the owner, but also from the state, no state can rightfully
claim ownership of newly developed land in the high seas. Technically, it
can be done either by dumping large amounts of dirt, sand, or gravel in
the ocean or by building stationary or floating platforms. The
drawback is that as of 1999, the state has control as far as 24
nautical miles (27 miles) from the coastline. And this might not even
be enough because the UN has ruled that states have the exclusive right to
the use of natural resources in the Exclusive
Economic Zone which is no less than 200 nautical miles (230 miles)
from the coastline. Furthermore, this strategy is initially a bit more
expensive than the democratic and the On
the other hand, you are not going to be paying any taxes at all.
Furthermore, concrete is incredibly cheap, so building platforms is not
very expensive. Floating platforms inhabited by one family or a small
neighborhood has another very big advantage: they can be connected to each
other, forming larger modules. This way the libertarian society can
gradually grow bigger. Last but not least, every single unit can leave the
community simply by floating away. Compared to today's cost of moving,
this is incredibly cheap and easy. Thus,
if the state hunts you down, you just float to more peaceful waters. This
applies to already existing states as well to states that might develop on
board. The
smaller the costs of moving, the harder it will be for a state to gain
power. As David Friedman writes in his book Machinery of Freedom:
"Consider our world as it would be if the cost of moving from one
country to another were zero. Everyone lives in a house trailer and speaks
the same language. One day, the president of To
conclude this part: if you omit violating the state's "right" to
ocean resources in the Exclusive Economic Zone, you can site new land on
floating platforms 27 miles from the coastline and have the same
advantages as with secession: complete freedom and independence, but still
close to the rest of the world. Furthermore, the risk of the state
intervening is much, much smaller; and if it still intervenes, you just
float away. Moreover, you are not limited to occupy only a certain seceded
area: after all, only 25% of the earth is occupied by states. The
remaining 75 floating percent are just waiting to be homesteaded.
To build new land seems to be both the most realistic and most attractive
strategy. Seastead Homesteading
the seas is exactly what the Seastead
project sets out to do. Wayne Grimlich and Patri Friedman, grandson of
Milton, have made a plan for how to incrementally move from building
swimming pool models to the first floating, seaworthy colossus. The
current step is to finish the book, explaining in detail how the floating
platforms will work. The objective of the book is to build interest
and make contact with investors. The
draft is about 100 pages and can be read online. There
have been earlier attempts to build new micro-nations at sea, but they
have by and large all been extremely unrealistic. Take, for instance, New
Utopia which is still waiting for some unknown billionaire to show up
and fund the whole thing. The Seastead approach is different, incremental,
and surprisingly cheap with an estimated cost of roughly $56/sq ft. of
area on the first couple of small
models. The seaworthy models will of course be bigger and therefore,
all other things equal, cheaper per sq ft. The hexagonal design of the
Seastead even makes it fit into larger
modules, so that the free area can be enlarged spontaneously and
gradually just like cities on the continent. Unfortunately,
the project seems to be in a bit of a lull with less than monthly updates
on the blog. But that
should not keep us from reading the
book, learn from their ideas, and make them happen. Besides, the fact
that several industries would have an interest in residing in a completely
unregulated tax haven, rich libertarians do indeed exist. Maybe they would
be no less than excited to invest in a seasteading project? See
also the presentation of Seastead at the Mark
Twain, 1800's: "Buy land. They've stopped making it" Seasteaders,
2003: "Memo: Production Resuming" Pictures are copyright of Seastead.org Lasse Birk Olesen is a Danish anarcho-capitalist, editor at Liberator.dk and co-founder of the Danish libertarian activist group EGO. You can e-mail him at: striketheroot AT fimp DOT dk
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F.A.
Hayek warned us about the 
