As I pointed out the last time this came up, it's been tried at least four times, with projects that got far enough to have people on an offshore construct.[1] All failed.
There is, of course, one huge success - Hong Kong. It's a collection of islands and a peninsula that run under a much more liberal set of rules than its parent nation.
There are various "special economic zones" around the world, in about 25 countries.[2] They're usually intended for export-oriented industries. India has had the most success with this concept.
The closest thing the US has to this is the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which is the legal arrangement which makes Disney almost a government around Disney World in Florida.
Note that neither Uber nor Airbnb would benefit from being on an island.
> “Why do people feel perfectly comfortable forming a startup when they know that 90 percent of them fail? Because they know that corporate laws and bankruptcy laws protect them from personal liability. They know that they won’t lose their house if the company goes bust.”
This is a intellectually dishonest statement. Even if you had no laws you would still be able to find investors willing to invest in an company, with the understanding that it could fail. The very concept of "personal liability" only makes sense inside a regulated society.
Hypothetically speaking, living in a everything-goes society, it's true you might get killed or have your house burned down - but that's only if you are bad at PR, communicating expectations, or self-defense.
In fact, a lot of people did just this earlier in history. The main reason startups are more successful now is because of the leverage technology provides. That and the fact that, for the most part, government/bandits don't take the money you get for creating wealth. Stability plays some role too, but there has been plenty of stable societies that didn't have anything resembling startups, and a lot of startups thrive in macro-economically unstable climates.
EDIT: Of course, the above hypothetical scenario is not prescriptive, i.e. it's not desirable. It's simply an extreme example that illustrates why Mr. Regulator's statements are wrong and intellectually dishonest.
"that's only if you are bad at PR and communicating expectations, or self-defense."
Without the stability of rule of law in a reasonably regulated state, self-defense is incredibly difficult in the modern world, with modern technology allowing for sniper shots at greater than a kilometer. The illusion of security is simple, but actual security is not. Most normal people would rather live in a society where they didn't have to worry about PR, communicating expectation, and careful security with the knowledge that the more they had the greater the risk of mortal peril. Not that I wouldn't mind some people trying it somewhere to illustrate the failings of simple-minded idealism graphically as Marxists did, so long as it was a small-scale human failure.
"Even if you had no laws you would still be able to find investors willing to invest in an company, with the understanding that it could fail."
The problem is collecting if it succeeds. Shared ownership requires a legal structure. Without it, businesses are mostly owned by a single person, family operations, or one-shot high risk transactions.
The article focuses heavily on government regulation which makes me feel like it subconsciously paints a picture of "those evil capitalists trying to escape regulation...haha fail".
In the light of recent mass surveillance revelations I think less government is still very much a valuable goal to strive for.
The counterexamples regarding infrastructure are a bit too tongue in cheek for me, too.
The point about the legal system makes sense on the surface but only if contrasted with no legal system at all. Pretty much all "freedom utopias" I'm aware of are heavily based on a strong belief in property rights and private contracts.
How can you enforce property rights and private contracts without a state? You have a contract with the richest person in the local area (aka the man with the largest army / aka the local warlord). How do you ensure he pays when he is liable to pay? Moreover, how do you ensure he doesn't just kidnap you, and force you to work for him for free?
> How can you enforce property rights and private contracts without a state?
By having a state you refuse to acknowledge is a state.
> the man with the largest army / aka the local warlord
See? This is a state. A local warlord capable of enforcing his laws over a given region is a state. A violent, corrupt, autocratic state, to be sure, but a state nonetheless.
Calling it something else doesn't make it anything else.
The richest man in town with all the guns, do you mean uncle Sam? The guy who tortures and murders innocent people without consequence, he's the guy you want to empower and trust with property rights, the guy who allows his cops to steal property without cause, that's the guy you want enforcing property rights?
While states dominate history, private law has proven successful. You could see the Law Merchant throughout Europe as one example or medieval Iceland, where civil order was maintained for longer than the US has existed so far, as another.
> You could see the Law Merchant throughout Europe as one example
That is not an example of justice in the absence of the state. All the principal trading cities were governed, whether as city states (Venice), as quasi-independent city states within a federated league (Lubeck, Hamburg, and the other Hanseatic States) or as cities within national kingdoms (London, Ipswich and other cities under the English crown). It is an example of states agreeing to standardized laws to attract traders and provide a solid basis for ongoing trade.
From the Merchant of Venice:
The duke cannot deny the course of law.
For the commodity that strangers have
With us in Venice, if it be denied,
Will much impeach the justice of his state.
Since that the trade and profit of the city
Consisteth of all nations.
The presence of common merchant law does not mean the absense of a state.
I said private law, not purely anarchic examples. I could give more anarchic ones if you liked but it's revisionist history so you'd have to do a good bit of reading to really discuss it.
Iceland is an example of polycentric law fairly close to what anarcho-capitalists advocate. You didn't really address that or the other points.
The first big difference between the Lex Mercatoria and present-day law is the source being jurisprudence and not bureaucratic legislation. The second would be cases being torts with an identifiable victim versus today's with victimless "crimes against society".
For why legislation is awful and for a hint at solutions under an eminently human system of law in a free society see these:
"Less government" is a bit of "optimizing for what you can measure": It's easy to see that fewer people work for the government, so the people left must not be as involved in invading privacy, right?
Except that doesn't follow. It's entirely possible to trim NASA, for example, and have less government, but NASA wasn't involved in phone-tapping. Trimming the EPA also won't solve any of the actual problems, and will create new ones.
So "less government" is a palatable dogma, maybe, but it's only loosely related to what we're trying to achieve.
Since the end of the space shuttle program, NASA has little/no role in launching military & spy satellites. United Launch Alliance is the primary contractor.
> Dempsey argues there should be greater recognition of the extent to which startups benefit from government infrastructure. "I can guarantee that if you don’t have a legal structure you will not have innovation," he says. "Instead you will have chaos."
I'd say that one doesn't necessarily imply the other. It's possible to agree on a legal framework (code of conduct, how contracts are enforced etc.) without government infrastructure. Government infrastructure on the other hand doesn't necessarily imply a well-structured, consistent legal system. Just ask any entrepreneur in any country about the intricacies and inconsistencies of local tax laws. Common law by its very nature is complex and often contradictory.
However, in the absence of copyright, presumably it would be much easier to download quality content (assuming for the purposes of the hypothetical that all the content had been made in the first place) given that, for example, Napster v1 would be perfectly legal. Storage and bandwidth still need to be paid for of course and there might be a market for services that curated and served up free music and movies but the price would presumably have to be less than a subscription for Spotify or Netflix.
In that hypothetical scenario, why would starving artists continue distributing their work? They would simply look for another job that paid the bills.
I for one choose to believe that people mostly want to support the artists, hence the popularity of said services.
Most wouldn't. And the vast majority of films certainly wouldn't be made if they had to depend on donations.
>I for one choose to believe that people mostly want to support the artists, hence the popularity of said services.
I think that's very optimistic of you. In a world where you had a Netflix and a "Cheapflix" that was a quarter the monthly price because it (legally) didn't pay for any of its content but was otherwise identical to the Netflix of that world, I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people would go with the less expensive option.
You might be right. However, anedoctally, most of my friends are paying for Spotify Premium and Netflix even when torrent downloads are just around the corner. And these are not rich people with money to spare; these are grad students or a few recent graduates on a budget like myself.
So I still believe that people would rather go legal and support the artists when they have the option.
Netflix and Spotify are irrelevant and useless in a world without copyright. They exist as a means to conveniently get media served over the internet. YouTube or Mega Video would be convenient if it weren't for DMCA takedowns, domain seizure and raids.
YouTube works really well for music, they have deals with the music industry. I haven't had song blocked on youtube in a long time, depends on where you live though.
Spotify still exists.
There are thousands of alternatives to Mega Video, for example popcorn time, which is pretty much as convinient as netflix itself.
Netflix still exists.
No, they aren't irrelevant in a copyright less world.
Nice resort model. Where are the gun emplacements to fend off the pirates?
The article also neglected to mention another difference between, say, California and Texas: employers don't own your every stray thought in California. Hard to get smart people to work for you under dumb conditions.
What, you don't want to come work in Petopia??? (or whatever it was in the "Family Guy" episode where the dad finds out he has the right to make his house into its own country)
The first thing that came to my mind when I saw this man made island in international waters was that someone can just get a boat and a few armed men and rob the place. I agree with all the complaints about government surveillance, intrusion and so on, but the one thing that they do provide that would be sort of important for a place like that is protection. So then they would have to raise money for an army to protect themselves... next thing you know you are paying taxes for the military...and so on and son, you get the idea, you are right back where you started.
Stopping? Not for all of history, but for significant periods of time during the formation of a new government, before it eventually grows out of control.
But sadly, yes, it was meant more as a theoretical possibility rather than one anyone has actually pulled off.
> Some of the most explosive tech companies today benefit intensely from various pockets of regulation: Spotify and Netflix[...]; Lyft and Uber [...]; Stripe, Square, and even much of Mr. Thiel’s early success at PayPal [...]. And don’t forget the Internet itself [...]
All his examples are bogus/fallacies.
> without copyright law, for instance, no one would pay for those services
If copyright law did not exist and people did not pay for the artists, artists would have no incentive to compose/perform/record/distribute their work. That would create the incentive for people to pay for those services. As lawl pointed out, people already pay for these services for their convenience.
> ever been to a country without paved roads?
The private sector would happily pave the entire world. Road pavement is not something only the government can do. We have numerous examples of roads built by the private sector (private toll roads, anyone?).
> without SEC regulations to limit our financial losses on identity theft, who would so freely hand out their credit card information?
The same people who would use a credit card in the first place.
> And don’t forget the Internet itself, which began as a scientific communications network started by the government.
Really? How can you predict it would not be created in some other form by the private sector?
Building a nation is hard, much like building a software stack; you have to stand on tons of infrastructure to be able to make it work, and the underpinnings often aren't pretty and/or efficient. Look at the mess that most TCP/IP stacks are, and at some of the more baroque forms of administration you find out there, like those old livestock rights they have in the City of London.
Interestingly, the software industry is the least regulated industry I can think of, and the most rapidly evolving. I wouldn't be quick to dismiss the correlation.
The D programming language tools are also developed under the Boost license, which is pretty much a rejection of copyright protection.
Second, the reporter talks about startups "benefit[ing]" from regulation. But it doesn't mention how government agencies have targeted drones, genetic tests (23andMe), 3D printing (DD), Uber and Lyft (in some states), Tesla (dealer sales), Airbnb (in some cities), Bitcoin (FinCEN), etc. The reporter mentions Spotify and Netflix as companies that benefit from regulation, which is false; they benefit from copyright law. The thing is you can have copyright law without FCC/SEC-style top-down rate-setting regulation (US copyright law predated the FCC/SEC by over a century).
Third, the reporter mentions Balaji Srinivasan of Andreessen Horowitz, but neglects to say whether he changed his mind and is "letting go." I heard Srinivasan speak three days ago in Palo Alto, and I suspect he hasn't. The reporter quotes YC's own Sam Altman as speaking dismissively about seasteading, but never said he's changed his mind (as far as I know Altman always held that opinion). You might as well quote Democrats talking about Hillary Clinton one day and Republicans the next and claim Americans are "letting go" of that presidential candidate.
Maybe seasteads will never happen, maybe the darknet will never be robust, maybe we'll never get to Mars, and maybe there's a case to be made that Silicon Valley is "letting go" of these dreams. But this article failed to make it.
36 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 92.7 ms ] threadThere is, of course, one huge success - Hong Kong. It's a collection of islands and a peninsula that run under a much more liberal set of rules than its parent nation.
There are various "special economic zones" around the world, in about 25 countries.[2] They're usually intended for export-oriented industries. India has had the most success with this concept.
The closest thing the US has to this is the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which is the legal arrangement which makes Disney almost a government around Disney World in Florida.
Note that neither Uber nor Airbnb would benefit from being on an island.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micronation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_economic_zone
This is a intellectually dishonest statement. Even if you had no laws you would still be able to find investors willing to invest in an company, with the understanding that it could fail. The very concept of "personal liability" only makes sense inside a regulated society.
Hypothetically speaking, living in a everything-goes society, it's true you might get killed or have your house burned down - but that's only if you are bad at PR, communicating expectations, or self-defense.
In fact, a lot of people did just this earlier in history. The main reason startups are more successful now is because of the leverage technology provides. That and the fact that, for the most part, government/bandits don't take the money you get for creating wealth. Stability plays some role too, but there has been plenty of stable societies that didn't have anything resembling startups, and a lot of startups thrive in macro-economically unstable climates.
EDIT: Of course, the above hypothetical scenario is not prescriptive, i.e. it's not desirable. It's simply an extreme example that illustrates why Mr. Regulator's statements are wrong and intellectually dishonest.
Without the stability of rule of law in a reasonably regulated state, self-defense is incredibly difficult in the modern world, with modern technology allowing for sniper shots at greater than a kilometer. The illusion of security is simple, but actual security is not. Most normal people would rather live in a society where they didn't have to worry about PR, communicating expectation, and careful security with the knowledge that the more they had the greater the risk of mortal peril. Not that I wouldn't mind some people trying it somewhere to illustrate the failings of simple-minded idealism graphically as Marxists did, so long as it was a small-scale human failure.
The problem is collecting if it succeeds. Shared ownership requires a legal structure. Without it, businesses are mostly owned by a single person, family operations, or one-shot high risk transactions.
The counterexamples regarding infrastructure are a bit too tongue in cheek for me, too. The point about the legal system makes sense on the surface but only if contrasted with no legal system at all. Pretty much all "freedom utopias" I'm aware of are heavily based on a strong belief in property rights and private contracts.
By having a state you refuse to acknowledge is a state.
> the man with the largest army / aka the local warlord
See? This is a state. A local warlord capable of enforcing his laws over a given region is a state. A violent, corrupt, autocratic state, to be sure, but a state nonetheless.
Calling it something else doesn't make it anything else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_mercatoria
https://mises.org/library/medieval-iceland-and-absence-gover...
Regarding your other concerns see points 8 & 6 here:
http://c4ss.org/content/13612
While I have some differences with this author, you could consider this video as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTYkdEU_B4o
That is not an example of justice in the absence of the state. All the principal trading cities were governed, whether as city states (Venice), as quasi-independent city states within a federated league (Lubeck, Hamburg, and the other Hanseatic States) or as cities within national kingdoms (London, Ipswich and other cities under the English crown). It is an example of states agreeing to standardized laws to attract traders and provide a solid basis for ongoing trade.
From the Merchant of Venice:
The duke cannot deny the course of law.
For the commodity that strangers have
With us in Venice, if it be denied,
Will much impeach the justice of his state.
Since that the trade and profit of the city
Consisteth of all nations.
The presence of common merchant law does not mean the absense of a state.
Iceland is an example of polycentric law fairly close to what anarcho-capitalists advocate. You didn't really address that or the other points.
The first big difference between the Lex Mercatoria and present-day law is the source being jurisprudence and not bureaucratic legislation. The second would be cases being torts with an identifiable victim versus today's with victimless "crimes against society".
For why legislation is awful and for a hint at solutions under an eminently human system of law in a free society see these:
https://www.mises.org/sites/default/files/11_2_5_0.pdf
http://www.walterblock.com/wp-content/uploads/publications/b...
Except that doesn't follow. It's entirely possible to trim NASA, for example, and have less government, but NASA wasn't involved in phone-tapping. Trimming the EPA also won't solve any of the actual problems, and will create new ones.
So "less government" is a palatable dogma, maybe, but it's only loosely related to what we're trying to achieve.
I'd say that one doesn't necessarily imply the other. It's possible to agree on a legal framework (code of conduct, how contracts are enforced etc.) without government infrastructure. Government infrastructure on the other hand doesn't necessarily imply a well-structured, consistent legal system. Just ask any entrepreneur in any country about the intricacies and inconsistencies of local tax laws. Common law by its very nature is complex and often contradictory.
Really? People already decide to pay for it instead of pirating it, because it's more convinient, not because they're scared of breaking the law.
But they don't have the clean metadata, sometimes releases are botched, parts are missing, this wouldn't be much different if it weren't illegal.
Pirates have way larger libraries than netflix, and people still pay for it.
I for one choose to believe that people mostly want to support the artists, hence the popularity of said services.
>I for one choose to believe that people mostly want to support the artists, hence the popularity of said services.
I think that's very optimistic of you. In a world where you had a Netflix and a "Cheapflix" that was a quarter the monthly price because it (legally) didn't pay for any of its content but was otherwise identical to the Netflix of that world, I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people would go with the less expensive option.
So I still believe that people would rather go legal and support the artists when they have the option.
Spotify still exists.
There are thousands of alternatives to Mega Video, for example popcorn time, which is pretty much as convinient as netflix itself.
Netflix still exists.
No, they aren't irrelevant in a copyright less world.
The article also neglected to mention another difference between, say, California and Texas: employers don't own your every stray thought in California. Hard to get smart people to work for you under dumb conditions.
What, you don't want to come work in Petopia??? (or whatever it was in the "Family Guy" episode where the dad finds out he has the right to make his house into its own country)
But sadly, yes, it was meant more as a theoretical possibility rather than one anyone has actually pulled off.
All his examples are bogus/fallacies.
> without copyright law, for instance, no one would pay for those services
If copyright law did not exist and people did not pay for the artists, artists would have no incentive to compose/perform/record/distribute their work. That would create the incentive for people to pay for those services. As lawl pointed out, people already pay for these services for their convenience.
> ever been to a country without paved roads?
The private sector would happily pave the entire world. Road pavement is not something only the government can do. We have numerous examples of roads built by the private sector (private toll roads, anyone?).
> without SEC regulations to limit our financial losses on identity theft, who would so freely hand out their credit card information?
The same people who would use a credit card in the first place.
> And don’t forget the Internet itself, which began as a scientific communications network started by the government.
Really? How can you predict it would not be created in some other form by the private sector?
The D programming language tools are also developed under the Boost license, which is pretty much a rejection of copyright protection.
First, the pro-seasteading folks are not "letting go" -- as far as I can tell, they're in it for the long haul and have said for the better part of a decade that they intend to take small steps to learn about the engineering requirements for a blue-water seastead. Here are articles I wrote on the topic when they were saying that back in 2009: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/next-frontier-seasteading-the-oc... http://www.cbsnews.com/news/seasteaders-take-first-step-towa...
Second, the reporter talks about startups "benefit[ing]" from regulation. But it doesn't mention how government agencies have targeted drones, genetic tests (23andMe), 3D printing (DD), Uber and Lyft (in some states), Tesla (dealer sales), Airbnb (in some cities), Bitcoin (FinCEN), etc. The reporter mentions Spotify and Netflix as companies that benefit from regulation, which is false; they benefit from copyright law. The thing is you can have copyright law without FCC/SEC-style top-down rate-setting regulation (US copyright law predated the FCC/SEC by over a century).
Third, the reporter mentions Balaji Srinivasan of Andreessen Horowitz, but neglects to say whether he changed his mind and is "letting go." I heard Srinivasan speak three days ago in Palo Alto, and I suspect he hasn't. The reporter quotes YC's own Sam Altman as speaking dismissively about seasteading, but never said he's changed his mind (as far as I know Altman always held that opinion). You might as well quote Democrats talking about Hillary Clinton one day and Republicans the next and claim Americans are "letting go" of that presidential candidate.
Maybe seasteads will never happen, maybe the darknet will never be robust, maybe we'll never get to Mars, and maybe there's a case to be made that Silicon Valley is "letting go" of these dreams. But this article failed to make it.