Free Private Cities #187 (P)
Would we thrive without governments?
The prophets of the new world are dreaming up private cities, places free from government control, taxation and oppressive laws. But could a privately run city really work? And can history help us understand the future?
Dear friends of Daily Philosophy,
we’re a bit later than usual again with this post. This time I have an excuse: I have been redesigning the printable newsletter to make it look more attractive and I have been trying to find a better way of making it accessible to the premium subscribers. For the time being, you will find all newsletters in a special post that I will pin to the top of the Substack page next week. That post will contain all the links to past numbers and you will be able to download them from there. I hope that you will like the new design. Please feel free to comment and tell me what you think!
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Governing the Wild West
The Seasteading movement has always been about more than fish. For its proponents, “the sea” is not primarily an ecosystem or even a resource to be exploited, but a free, unregulated, empty canvas on which they can project their social and economic visions. It doesn’t really matter to the visionaries of the new, liberal economy, whether one calls that substrate “the sea,” “the Wild West,” “Honduras,” or “Mars.” An agar plate will do. It is always a place that’s just outside the jurisdiction of our countries, governments, presidents, tax systems and product liability laws, a place where everything is possible and where free enterprise can grow and prosper without being challenged by burdensome social contracts.
It is just this feature of Seasteading that makes it interesting for mankind’s future, regardless of whether we will ever actually live on the waves. There is a long tradition of liberal governance experiments that begins in antiquity and extends into our present and future, and the Seasteading movement is just one more facet of it.
Troy, Athens, Sparta and Rome were city states, places that had their own rules and governments and that were independent of any overarching state authority. Renaissance Florence and Venice and today’s Hong Kong and Singapore are, to some extent, city states. But of course none of these have had a “private” government like the libertarian vision demands. It is telling, though, that Hong Kong’s leader of government is called the “Chief Executive,” as if the city were just another private corporation. In what was called the Holy Roman Empire, “free imperial cities” were only subordinate to the Emperor himself and not to any territorial rulers, princes or dukes. “Home rule” is exercised, to various degrees, in Greenland and the Faroe Islands (self-governing, although formally part of Denmark), and the demand for it has been a defining part of the histories of Ireland and India, for example.
But both Ireland and India are, arguably, examples of how one should not go about achieving independence. Instead of taking over an existing political system via a revolutionary process, colonising an empty ocean promises a new world without the violence and bloodshed that is associated with getting rid of the established power structures.
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