April, 2009

Seasteading and Its Critics

Cato Unbound Managing Editor Jason Kuznicki writes in Cato @ Liberty: What’s needed, Friedman claims, is not more study or advocacy, but a change in the deeper institutional structures that give rise to government policies… Is this just a young person’s impatience? Or has Friedman found a serious weakness in libertarian activism? One reply I [...]

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A Plea for Politics

Editors’ Note: Cato Unbound occasionally runs contributions from individuals who have particular expertise or a particularly insightful view of the issue at hand. This month we received the following essay by Dan Greenberg. Greenberg is a lawyer, an Arkansas state legislator, and an adjunct professor of law at the Bowen Law School of the University [...]

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Teaching and Doing Depend on Each Other

by Brian Doherty
The Conversation
April 16th, 2009

Peter Thiel’s and Jason Sorens’s most recent contributions to this debate contain both much truth and much well-justified emotion. Both of them remind me of something depressing but worth thinking about when contemplating how we might get to a satisfyingly libertarian future: that maybe it just isn’t possible at all, given any reasonable future we [...]

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The Importance and Limitations of Groundwork

I’d like to clarify my thesis a bit and acknowledge the important (but limited) role of existing libertarian organizations.  Brian Doherty wrote: “Folk activism” — talking, debating, and proselytizing, as [Patri] defines it — does indeed have the potential to see libertarians “changing system-wide incentives.” Admittedly, it’s a long, slow, so far largely failed slog [...]

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Free Societies Are Neither Popular nor Disciplined

by Jason Sorens
The Conversation
April 15th, 2009

Both Seasteading and the Free State Project face a similar problem: a free society in the current climate will annoy or even enrage powerful people. Certainly, any society that seeks to legalize the production and export of narcotics currently prohibited in the United States would incur swift and overwhelming retribution from the federal government. Considerations [...]

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The Education of a Libertarian

by Peter Thiel
Reaction Essay
April 13th, 2009

Peter Thiel shares the belief that politics is mostly futile, a conclusion he reached after years of activism. In particular, he believes that democratic politics is unlikely to bring about libertarian outcomes. Fortunately, politics is just one sphere of human life, and it’s possible, he argues, to create technologies that minimize its reach. Thiel describes a “deadly race” between politics and technology, in which human freedom is the prize. The goal of libertarian activism should not be to win in politics, he argues, but to escape it.

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Leveraging Institutional Change

by Jason Sorens
Reaction Essay
April 10th, 2009

Jason Sorens reviews several important historical developments, including the rise of free trade in the nineteenth century and the growth of the welfare state in the twentieth. He concludes that structural change matters, and that incentives play a larger role than ideology in determining the type of government we get. He then considers several of the key challenges of both Seasteading and the Free State Project, as well as a few encouraging developments in recent politics that appear tied to the rise of the Free State movement. He counsels patience, but also proposes several strategies for moving forward.

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The Many Paths to Libertarianism

by Brian Doherty
Reaction Essay
April 8th, 2009

Brian Doherty argues that Patri Friedman is both right in some ways and wrong in others. He’s right when he argues that incentives and technologies largely determine the shape of government today, and create the problems that libertarians tirelessly point out. He’s wrong, however, to dismiss “folk activism” entirely: Not only has it achieved some clear though incremental good, but it also helps create more libertarians, and at some point, this effort seems likely to bear fruit. Not only that, but seasteading relies on some folk activism itself, in convincing a large number of people that it would be a good idea to try. On the whole, Doherty welcomes seasteading as one of many possible paths to a more libertarian world.

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