The Right Utopia

In a recent profile by Details magazine, it was revealed that Peter Thiel, PayPal founder (He also manages a hedge fund, Clarium Capital, and is a founding partner in a venture-capital firm called the Founders Fund) has contributed $1.25 million dollars to the Seasteading Institute, a plan hatched by Patri Friedman, the grandson of free market economist Milton Friedman to establish “new sovereign nations built on oil-rig-type platforms anchored in international waters — free from the regulation and the laws of any country.” The Details profile explains, “They’d be small city-states at first, although the aim is to have tens of millions of seasteading residents by 2050.” Already, plans are underway to launch an office complex off the coast of San Francisco next year, adding full-time housing settlements on the island seven years later. Architectural plans for a prototype involve a movable, diesel-powered, 12,000-ton structure with room for 270 residents, with the idea that dozens—perhaps even hundreds—of these could be linked together. Friedman hopes to launch a flotilla of offices off the San Francisco coast next year; full-time settlement, he predicts, will follow in about seven years; and full diplomatic recognition by the United Nations, well, that'll take some lawyers and time. The ultimate goal is to open a frontier for experimenting with new ideas for government. This translates into the founding of ideologically oriented micro-states on the high seas for implementing policies of the libertarian right.

One potential model is something Friedman calls Appletopia: A corporation, such as Apple, "starts a country as a business. The more desirable the country, the more valuable the real estate," Friedman says. When I ask if this wouldn't amount to a shareholder dictatorship, he doesn't flinch. "The way most dictatorships work now, they're enforced on people who aren't allowed to leave." Appletopia, or any seasteading colony, would entail a more benevolent variety of dictatorship, similar to your cell-phone contract: You don't like it, you leave.

"When you start a company, true freedom is at the beginning of things," Thiel says "The United States Constitution had things you could do at the beginning that you couldn't do later. So the question is, can you go back to the beginning of things? How do you start over?"
In a 2009 essay for the Cato Institute, he flatly declared, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." He went on: "The great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms," with the critical question being "how to escape not via politics but beyond it. Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country."

Until a libertarian colony can be established in outer space—Thiel is bullish on that idea, too, though he thinks the technology needs at least a half-century to develop—seasteading will have to suffice.

Dream on ...The "anarcho"-capitalist Libertarians are wrong to think that capitalism could exist without a state. In the Libertarian’s mind, capitalism is—or should be—a world made up of enterprising capitalists, minding their own business(es) and interacting peacefully, without any need for the state to intervene in these affairs. Here we are basically dealing with the viewpoint of the individual capitalist, particularly the small-scale one, who experiences the state as an unpleasant institution that appropriates his hard-earned wealth through taxation to pay for things that bring him no direct benefit. Remove this alien force, he reasons, and life would immediately be much rosier. The “liberty” that Libertarians wax so philosophical about is the freedom of this economic actor to chase after his profit in peace; never minding the fact that his own profits are squeezed out of workers, thus depriving them of their own personal liberty!

The state may seem a complete waste of taxpayer money to the individual capitalist (and to the Libertarian who translates his myopic viewpoint into a grand philosophy), but things look a bit different if we consider the capitalist class as a whole. Like any ruling class throughout history, the minority capitalist class needs the state, as an apparatus of coercion, to maintain its grip on power. And in addition to this age-old function of the state, a capitalist state is also necessary as a means of coordinating the diverse interests of individual capitalists in order to represent their collective interests as capitalists. The recent recession alone shows how deregulation may benefit a tiny stratum of capitalists at the expense of their bourgeois brethren. (This does not mean, however, that state intervention and regulation can turn capitalism into socialism, as Libertarians fear and the liberals and leftists hope.) Given this twin-necessity for the state—as policeman and mediating judge—the more far-sighted or financially comfortable capitalists view the taxes directed to the state apparatus as a necessary expenditure.

Libertarians, such as Thiel and Friedman, in short, loathe the state without understanding why it must exist their cherished capitalist system. If members of the Libertarian Right are serious about liberty, and truly want to live under a state-less system, then they need to consider ending their silly love affair with the capitalist market, whose invisible hand has been slapping all of us around.