How the story was written:
"Pay Pal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine.
Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch--free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be 'a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons'..."
Source.
How it should have been written:
"Pay Pal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating tax havens and wealth sinks for trans and metanational corporations.
Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build corporate piracy coordination centers, tax shelters and corporate headquarters on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea itself could be judged as either vulgar cynicism, or ugly naivete. It is cynical, since these tax havens will be wholly owned subsidiaries of banking houses, oil companies and extraction firms, and will therefore allow them to operate with the same dual function as the Vatican, as both an independent nation, and as a parasite upon subject populations outside of national confines. It is naive, especially for those without wealth who, yet again, are advocating for their own declining ability to counter concentrations of power, because it assumes that small, relatively affluent polities would be immune from predation by larger territorial nation-states, or other corporations. The idea is for these countries to start up with considerable corporate funding, especially through shell companies and cut outs--free from the already rudimentary and largely unenforced protections against the concentration of wealth and power, for those unfortunate enough to belong to such a polity, but not maintain an ownership stake. Details says the experiment would be a way for libertarians who can never afford to buy a stake in these capitalist platforms to pretend that they can win theoretical arguments against other people on the internet who are stupid enough to be wrong about the super duper awesomeness of glib libertarianism. And while glibertarians will naively continue to imagine that no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons will result in a paradise of Freedom™ , the truth of the matter is significantly more sordid, tragic and predictable: those who can afford to purchase their way out of fealty to a nation state will rule those who can only manage to sign on as jobbers, with even fewer resources to employ against those who would degrade them further..."
Crow's Eye: Maintaining a commitment to Pointless Acrimony™ and Hate Filled Invective™! Also available in corvid mischief and traditional sly dog's mistrust.
6 comments:
Huh. If these libertarian pseudo-islands ever become real, I could support a little old-fashioned US imperial expansionism.
I've been saying for years that those Micronesian islands with no extradition treaties with the U.S. aren't buying themselves.
Only question is what would wipe out floating Galt's Gulch first: some superstorm, pirates, or a Lord of the Flies glibertarian collapse.
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No bigger welfare babies on the earth than these fuckers. Somebody should put them on a "welfare to work" program.
Real-life Bioshock. I think Dick Cheney would turn these floating Libertopias into private hunting preserves. Leader of the pack, indeed.
Amalgamating points made in another discussion (and after corresponding with an old friend who actually builds rigs, sub rigs and platforms):
The average cost to build, without any of the drilling equipment, would run from $350 million to $1 billion dollars.
So:
"Let's imagine that a floating nation could be built "cheaply" (and it would have to be, or it would never get built) Contractors aren't going to pay Euro or American wage rates, so it would be built with cheap Asian and African labor, and therefore end up being about three days from any given Filipino, Indonesian or Thai piracy outfit.
It would be staffed with locals working without protection for terrible wages, with food, board and other costs deducted. Other deductible costs would include waste disposal, fresh water, and security.
Those natives would work (be ruled directly by) for Euro and American stakeholders who could afford to buy in. These "floating nations" would therefore almost exclusively house the factor offices of corporations, mercenaries, pirates wealthy enough not to be called pirates, organized criminals, drug traffickers and fugitives from financial crimes prosecution.
Assuming that the owners don't try to maximize their return on investment and license and lease out as much space to fees, stakes and dues paying profit companies (restaurants, laundry facilities, transport, etc), someone(s) still has to haul portage, load ships, empty shit containers, pump sewage, clean pipes and ducts, and sweep floors.
If this is contracted out to a larger company, they will bring in cheap local labor. If this is maintained in house by the parent corporation, it will bring in cheap, local labor.
Charity wouldn't pay off the note. Assuming that a consortium could actually get one of these built, it would have to be built within the Indonesian archipelago.
And the only people who could afford to avail themselves of the tax shelter would be criminals, corporations, pirates, mercenary outfits, financial crimes fugitives and Sese Sekos.
What happens, then, the first time, I dunno, the Russians decide that they still have jurisdiction over a Chechen heroin dealer who owns a berth?
In other words, the only people who could really get into the game are existing metanats, existing states through cut outs, and organized crime."
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