Topic: Latest installment in series of hairbrained sovereignty schemes - page 2. (Read 3036 times)

One might say I'm fascinated by what I see as the earth shaking power of crowed funding. Consequently I spend a lot of time thinking about how crowed funding might be used to advance the cause of liberty. More specifically still, how it may potentially be used to facilitate the creation of new units of sovereignty, how it may further the decentralization of sovereignty. I've calmed down a bit on the idea of realizing individual sovereignty. Of course that is the ultimate goal but i don't think its a particularly realistic one, atleast not in the short term for normal folks who wish to live comfortable lives. I think perhaps a worthy interim goal may be the idea of creating publicly traded sovereign corporations. The following is, what i think is, a practical proposition for leveraging the power of crowed-funding to creating a publicly traded sovereign corporation. no altruism, activism or ideology required here. this is not a libertarian scheme. this is pure business. this is intended to be a promising investment opportunity. Purely incidentally it may happen to cause some libertarian spillover however the key theme here is panarchy, not anarchy. Sorry anarchists, 1 step at a time.

Note: this is a very rough sketch of the idea, specific numbers are up for debate and just very rough estimations resulting from some preliminary calculations

My idea is to use crowed funding to raise the funds necessary to build the bare-bones structure of an oil platform. It's very important that it be built from scratch. All existing oil platforms were built as the property of registered corporations making them the sovereign territory of the state in which the corporation which built them is registered.

The target would be 2 billion dollars. 1 billion to pay for infrastructure and 1 billion to pay for insurance. It would not be a flexable funding campaign, if a single penny less than 2 billion was raised than not a single pleader would be charged. 2 billion shares would be issued. The minimum amount that could be pledged would be 1 dollar. Each dollar pledged would entitle the pledger to 1 share in the corporation.

The firm would run just like any other corporation with some minor distinctions. The shareholders would be "the government" and the executives selected by the shareholders to run the firm would comprise "the state". Revenue would be derived entirely from charging rent on real estate. Profit would be calculated as the revinue collected from rental fees minus the expenses of maintaining the infrastructure, paying the management, and paying insurance. The executives would decide how much of the profits to reinvest in the firm and how much to pay in dividends to shareholders.

We would have a small navy for defense against pirates but the purpose of the navy would not be to protect us against other sovereigns, that would be the purpose of the billion dollars in insurance mentioned earlier. We would take out a diversified portfolio of insurance policies in order to protect us from attack by a state. I think this would be a much more cost effective approach than building a navy capable of defending against a state. The insurance policy would be something alone the lines of, we agree to pay insurance company X 100million dollars per year, in exchange insurance company X agrees to pay us, or our relatives in the event that we are dead, 1billion dollars in the event that we are unjustly attacked by a state. Say we have a similar policy with 10 insurance companies spread all over the world. These insurance companies would then find it in their interest to take a portion of the funds payed to them in order to use their political connections to lobby the governments of all of the world super powers. If there is only one thing we know about governments its that they can be controlled by well funded lobbyists. The insurance companies profit would be the payments collected from our sovereign corporation minus the cost of lobbying.

Anyway depending on the level of interest I may come back here and clean this proposal up. If there is a lot of interest than perhaps i will craft it into a fully fleshed out power-point presentation/business model. We'll see and take it 1 step at a time for now.