Paypal Founder Peter Thiel Invests to Create Floating Micro-Countries

I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.' I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, Where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.

Funny how these guys can only afford these things from their profits in "nanny states."<p>Basically this guy is keeping it close to San Francisco so that he can earn him money here and suck it over to his amusement park.<p>If he really believed in "libertarianism" he would just do it without the money and see how he can prosper then. But alas, the super rich are not like everyone else.

You'd still have to bank in other currencies, and you'd have to put your money in the markets of major economies, on which you would have to pay taxes. And you're not getting rid of social welfare like minimum wage, you're getting rid of the society. Is that what libertarians really are, at heart, merely anti-social?<p>For you the Randists and anti-Randists, and techo-utopians, feast your ideals on the great Adam Curtis' latest social hackumentary: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz2j3BhL47c" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz2j3BhL47c</a>

Floating countries for rich people. Products: Gambling licenses. Dual citizenships. Offshore banking (tax havens.) What am I missing?<p>Edit: Of course, nobody would actually be living in these places other than system admins. All the available space would be stuffed with servers to run the above services.

Jules Verne’s _The Floating Island_ foresaw ðis. Its conclusion? Inhabitants could not agree on much, so the island got torn apart.

Wouldn't "countries" like this be super vulnerable to attack? A few well-placed charges and it's like the place never existed.

I think you'll need several of them linked together before you get any useful testbed for government. Most systems of government can work at small scale. They don't break until you get lots of people. The whole thing should also wind up being more stable socially.<p>I really like the idea of ocean-going governmental experiments. Let's have socialist experiments and parecon experiments while we're at it. They really need to be sovereign, or they're just big cruise ships. They need to have complete ownership of the platforms, which almost means they need to be donated.<p>Obviously sinking is a big risk. Make sure there are well-drilled emergency procedures, and that the links between platforms are such that one sinking will not bring down any others. And keep lifeboats and dual citizenship, so if it goes south you'll have somewhere to go when they pick you out of the ocean.<p>I suspect that even if the first few iterations of this idea suck and/or are used for crass commercial purposes, it will likely get ironed out eventually. I think seagoing countries could be an important part of the future someday.

If a rich dude is doing it, you'll read about it on HN.

In other words, they're trying to implement something akin to Galt's Gulch (or an archipelago of them) from Atlas Shrugged.

is it just me or does that look like a ring of hell? who wants to be stuck on an island without sand, one restaurant, and no way to exercise outside?

I think one point has been ignored so far - this will be a really boring place to live compared to an average city. Can you imagine being stuck on a boat or a tiny island for years? That sounds like punishment to me.

It looks like their financial model revolves around skirting regulations. The example they give is "medical tourism". But it's basically going to be floating casinos and brothels, right?

Better invest in lots of defences... If you're an independent micro-country, nobody's going to rush to defend you from pirates.

This is a great test of Libertarian ideology. Personally, I suspect they'll quickly find out that those 'excessive' US taxes are paying for layer upon layer of security and infrastructure that is critical to the expansion of their wealth. Perhaps, though, their superior free-market will develop compact, cost-effective means of defense.<p>Then again, maybe they'll just end up in a nice tax shelter and use their political/financial connections to assure protection from the United States.