Topic: So much talk and 0 action, lets actually make a sovereign territory - page 3. (Read 3995 times)

I think you're mistaking the meaning of "decentralization" here, then. Division of labor still applies.
Yes, the cow lived at a farm, but it's not the only farm.
Yes, the milk was bottled at a plant, but it's not the only plant.
Yes, I bought the milk at a store, but it's not the only store.

I also relied on a great degree of decentralization in order to get my milk, and because it is so decentralized, the milk was cheaper than if it had all been produced on a central supply chain.

If you have a gallon of milk in your refrigerator, you relied on some degree of centralization to get it there.  It didn't come out of a cow in your backyard.  It came out of a cow on a big farm, and was processed and packaged in a big facility, and was carried through a big distribution network to a big grocery store operating on fossil fuels that came from a big mine or a big oilfield, protected and controlled by a big government with a big military, paid for by a big monetary system.

Replacing the monetary system doesn't change any of the rest of that overnight.

Because if it had come out of your backyard, you would have had to have foregone some other luxury in order to have achieved that.  Your entire standard of living is dependent upon some degree of centralization.  It's all around you.  Just open your eyes and look.

But, ultimately, you decide how much centralization you will put up with.

Name 3. Hell, name 1.

Of course decentralization is preferable, when it's possible to achieve goals in a decentralized way.  Sometimes it just isn't.  Sometimes it might be better to voluntarily band together for support.  But the dilemma then becomes "what is the line between voluntary and involuntary centralization?"

That was the entire insight of Keynesianism, and the reason the 20th century was marked by centralization and warfare.  Keynes said "sometimes it's better to band together when under attack," and a bunch of megalomaniacs interpreted this as "create constant attacks as a means of centralization and control."  So, that's what we got.

But the question isn't between centralization versus decentralization, per se.  It's between voluntary versus involuntary.

Look at Bitcoin.  I say that Bitcoin is a voluntary system and that individuals own and control their Bitcoins.  Some people say that Bitcoin is a democratic system and that ownership of Bitcoins is decided by the whim of the network majority.

Bitcoin was supposed to be decentralized.  Now it has a government-sanctioned foundation, and a de-facto client, and a registered trademark, and a single major exchange, and a group of "core" developers, and official spokespersons, and regulators and investors who sit around all day trying to make the price of Bitcoins go up so that they can cash out and pay taxes instead of actually using Bitcoins to trade and to build a real economy.

As long as we all agree that decentralization is the goal, and we recognize the threats to Bitcoin achieving that goal and agree that voluntarism is a pre-requisite to temporary or conditional co-operation, it comes down to a cost/benefit analysis for each of us with regards to how much, and what kinds, of centralization we are willing to tolerate.

Now Iceland is the frontrunner to have Crypto money first. Good location, way better than Nauru people know and accept bitcoins and the pirate party already has a say about it in parliament.

http://falkvinge.net/2013/04/28/icelandic-pirate-party-wins-enters-parliament/

I was skeptical. I shouldn't have been.

This may be a long post, but I promise it's going to be the best one you've read this week.

Taking over any land that governments can reach is simply not going to have a happy ending. I'm sorry.

Let's say you crowdsource enough to flat-out buy land, with full soveriegn rights, from a poor country like Honduras or an island like Nauru...

Your first problem is that the other countries of the world won't recognize you as a country, and can sanction the hell out of you if not flat out murder you in your sleep without any consequences whatsoever.

Nations are most definitely an "old boy's club" like someone else here said before. They do not like competition in the least. They have a loooong history of simply invading the weaker nations and start-up attempts, if there is event the smallest resource there worth taking. Which brings us to the second, bigger problem...

Even if you have no resources whatsoever, and set up shop on an empty sandbar 1 foot above high tide directly on the equator in the middle of the pacific, you now face the problem of not wanting to be successful.

This problem will stop any variation of the "new colony" idea, even seasteading! Simply put, A completely free economy will rapidly become extremely valuable. -And then it's lunchtime, and you're the main course.

I was active in Seasteading for years. I even built some great little floating models and wrote some nice essays... & I thought if we could get far enough out, inbetween the continents so we weren't closer to any one big country, then we'd be safe enough, but then I started reading history and figuring out what the timeline of such a colony would look like.

The problem all boils down to success being a bad thing. You don't want to go out there to live like Gilligan, right? But if you succeed in building a capitalist society without paying taxes to another nation for protection, then you are doomed. You'll have become exactly what they would find most easy and most profitable to conquer.

Nations are simply evil and have no problems killing every last person on this settlement, EVEN ONE ON MARS, because their guns are bigger than ours and they really just don't like losing.

Nauru wow i really like it! all the free state people should have moved there. I move to declare nauru as bitcoin island!

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/123486-Mars-Colonization-Mission-Now-Taking-Applications

Enjoy

Stock take:

Vatican City: no
Monaco: no
San Marino: no
Tuvalu: no
Tonga: no
Pitcoin Islands: no
Marshall Islands: no
Micronesia: no
Kiribati: no
Iceland:  no
Nauru: unlikely*  no
Greenland: ?

Slab City:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vVCSUafFVI:  no
Freetown Christiania;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania:  no
Principality of Hutt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Hutt_River:  no
http://www.wirtland.com/:   no feedback yet
http://chartercities.org/concept:   no feedback yet
http://www.seasteading.org/:   no
http://blueseed.co/:   no

*Nauru currently lacks money to perform many of the basic functions of government; for example, the National Bank of Nauru is insolvent.
There are no personal taxes in Nauru. The unemployment rate is estimated to be 90 percent, and of those who have jobs, the government employs 95 percent
Tourism is not a major contributor to the economy
In the 1990s, Nauru became a tax haven and offered passports to foreign nationals for a fee,
The inter-governmental Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF) identified Nauru as one of 15 "non-cooperative" countries in its fight against money laundering. During the 1990s, it was possible to establish a licensed bank in Nauru for only $25,000 with no other requirements.
From 2001 to 2008, it accepted aid from the Australian Government in exchange for housing the Nauru detention centre. (reopend 2012)
There are no banks or ATMs in Nauru
Nauru had 9,378 residents as of July 2011.
The country is a member of the United Nations.
The Currency in use is the Australian dollar (AUD)  GDP 2006 estimate Total  $36.9 million
Nauruans are the most obese people in the world.
Nauru is the world's smallest republic.

http://www.seasteading.org/

http://blueseed.co/

Are you familiar with the idea of "charter cities", for example, Trujillo off the coast of Honduras?  http://www.economist.com/node/21541392

More information here: http://chartercities.org/concept

You can cooperate with existing governments to set up special economic zones with your own set of rules.  It might be worth starting one of those, or joining an existing one as they get the ball rolling.  I would favor one off the coast of Greece... they're broke enough they would probably sell you your own island! 

What guys?  Are you a citizen?

im just talking about paying to get our guys elected to every important position of power. I mean how much could that really cost in tuvalu? Everything else may fall like dominoes from there.

Arguably true. But the low GDP might not simply be because of a poor government, and the increased hardship involved would reduce the number of people who come. I mean, why aren't libertarians flooding into Somalia?

Tuvalu, well i been there.
The country basically survives from an Australian, New zealand trust funds.
Would they give up membership of world bank and asian develpment bank and risk relations form the hand who feeds them for bitcoins. Who is going to explain to them what a bitcoins is, most struggle to read a newspaper.
The majority of the useful land is 1 meter above high tide make in the middle of the ocean.  Who is paying for upgrading internet infrastructure in the middle of the ocean?? thousands of k's ocean cable to the nearest land.

Tuvalu is a member of the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.
Tuvalu maintains close relations with Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the European Union. It has diplomatic relations with the Republic of China (Taiwan); the ROC maintains the only resident embassy in Tuvalu and has a large assistance programme in the islands.
Tuvalu is party to a treaty of friendship with the United States,

The highest elevation is 4.6 metres (15 ft) above sea level on Niulakita, which gives Tuvalu the second-lowest maximum elevation of any country (after the Maldives). However, the highest elevations are typically in narrow storm dunes on the ocean side of the islands which are prone to overtopping in tropical cyclones, as occurred with Cyclone Bebe, which was a very early-season storm that passed through the Tuvaluan atolls in October 1972.
Because of the low elevation, the islands that make up this nation are threatened by current and future sea level rise.
Additionally, Tuvalu is annually affected by king tide events which peak towards the end of the austral summer, and raise the sea level higher than a normal high tide. As a result of historical sea level rise, the king tide events lead to flooding of low lying areas, which is compounded when sea levels are further raised by La Niña effects or local storms and waves. In the future, sea level rise may threaten to submerge the nation entirely as it is estimated that a sea level rise of 20–40 centimetres (8–16 inches) in the next 100 years could make Tuvalu uninhabitable.

Or not.  You likely are understimating by a couple orders of magnitude the cost and complexity of such an operation.  To become a citizen of Tuvalu (and most nations have similar requirements) you must be a resident for seven years AND renounce your existing citizenship.

Not that easy to convince people to move to the ass end of nowhere at huge personal risk for hope that in a decade or so they will be able to form a capitalist utopia.  Many citizens of an existing nation (poor or not) would not want mass immigration and would move to slow immigration and citizenship.  To make it worthwhile for existing residents they have to also believe their lives will be improved.  That means lots of spending on infrastructure, airports, schools, etc.  Just the advocacy and planning stages would require significant investment and residency.  Would you move there in the hopes some crowdfunded group on a forum didn't decide to get board and stop funding three or four years into the process.

An optimistic scenario would be a group of extremely wealth people, tens of billions of dollars in capital, and a decade or two.  It isn't something you are going to crowdfund.  It would require enough financially independent people capable and devoted enough to take the risk of moving to one of the poorest nations of earth and work tirelessly for the next decade or so to  reform and modernize it from within.

I had that idea too.  Rather than creating our own nation that would ultimately be vulnerable to the same drawbacks of greed and control, why don't we stop believing in nations and live as one united family, one world?  Imagine there's no countries, it's easy if you try.

World peace is only a communial choice away.

ok so here is the plan:

we crowed fund a campaign to get members of the mises academe elected to every position of significance in the Tuvalu government. They are SO poor in Tuvalu i dont even think it would cost that much, so if it failed it wouldn't even be that big of a deal i think, financially for all of us who contributed. You can subsititute tuvalu for a similarly poor country that has a nicer climate i just picked it because it appears to be the lowest gdp in the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nominal%29

what im saying is if they moved to the lowest gdp country in the world they could have probably already taken over the entire government.