Hey, kids, let's really go all John Galt on this nation of thieves and parasites and start our own country! All we have to do is follow Patri Friedman, who envisions a series of new sovereign nations built on oil-rig platforms anchored in international waters: “The ultimate goal,” Friedman says, “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, a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.
An isolated community populated by people desperate enough to work for less than minimum wage with easy access to weapons of all sorts sounds like quite a ride. Although I'm more intrigued by the selling point about building codes. Are zoning laws so terribly frustrating to some people's architectural dreams that they need to move to Waterworld to fulfill them? Wouldn't the engineering requirements of life on the ocean prove to be way more restricttive than building codes anyway?
Part of the fun of being libertarian is to act as a nag and a scold for those of the right and left who are too enthralled with big government. How much influence do these people hope to have hanging out together on an oil rig? Each floating "nation" would have room for just 270 residents, but the idea is that dozens, or even hundreds, could be linked together. If they're having trouble selling the idea, maybe they should get Kevin Costner to star in a movie about it.
