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The only argument you give for why this is such a stupid idea is that everything is just fine with existing countries/governments. I beg to disagree. Just in

The only argument you give for why this is such a stupid idea is that everything is just fine with existing countries/governments. I beg to disagree. Just in recent days we read on HN about cops assaulting 15 year old and throwing in jail 17 year old who filmed that on tape. We've been assaulted with Assange/WikiLeaks stories, where government officials are calling for assassinations, scramble to find existing/create new laws to prevent their dirty laundry being known to public. US is waging two unjust, unprovoked wars, started under made up pretenses (and that only few years after Vietnam disaster). Health care costs are spiraling out of control in US, while at the same time the quality of service is bad. Broadband in US is worse than in South Korea. Law making process is out of control, with mega-bills stuffed with unrelated rules bought by lobbying. War on drugs, terrorizing war on terror, prisons population out of control (compared to other countries). I could go on (and no, other countries are no better in that regard). What I like about that talk is that it talks about governments serving the people. On paper that's what it is but in practice the government is the master and it behaves like one. The government has all the power and the way it feels is that it is on a relentless drive to get even more power and it's a rare act of short lived triumph where some of its power is stripped away and sanity restored. The examples of power grab abound (expanding search and seizure at borders and in the airports, trying to silence whistle-blowers by e.g. bullying private sector, criminalizing behavior like recording police at work (so that they can abuse their power more freely), unconditionally accepting content industry propaganda about terrible losses from piracy and enacting censorship legislations that try to go around due process). So no, things are far from being good and I for one would welcome a government that tries to serve its people in reality, not just on paper.

guelo 16y ago
I definitely don't think the existing governments are fine, there's tons of things that make me rage about the state of things. My point was that if you want to (unpatriotically) give up on your country instead of trying to improve it, and you're rich, and you ignore language and culture (like the seasteading idea does), you have many other countries to pick from. Now if out of all the other countries in the world you can't find one that's even close to your ideals maybe there is a reason for that, maybe your utopia is not possible. Thiel as a CEO got to tell people what to do, he seems to have this idea that he will setup his government and people will just follow his rules. So I guess he's thinking of being some kind of benevolent dictator. In some other of his social writing* he has said he doesn't believe in democracy anymore. But even in a dictatorship you have to get consent from at least your security. In his effort to escape politics he doesn't seem to realize that politics is what happens when you get a lot of people together making decisions. What happens when charismatic socialist or conservatives leaders rise up in his country? What happens when special interests start competing with each other? If he were somehow able to solve the technical, economical, security and legal issues the whole thing would just devolve into the same political mess that every society goes through. How do I know? Because that's what happens everytime a government has been formed, it's what's happened to every single other country in the world. * http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/the-education-of-a-libertarian/ http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/the-educa...
- arethuza 16y ago
  What I wonder reading that article is what freedoms people like Thiel perceive are missing from his life - he is successful, immensely wealthy and living in what most people would regard as a free country.
  - billswift 16y ago
    The freedom to avoid, rather than have to pretend to be respectful to, incompetent, arrogant, often obnoxious officials, like cops, TSA, zoning boards, code enforcement, etc, etc, ad nauseum?
    - arethuza 16y ago
      I really don't think many of things are a big problem for someone as wealthy as he is (e.g. private air travel avoids the TSA problem). I'm sure high powered law firms/lobbyists/political contributions could soon remove any problems in other areas.
    - BerislavLopac 16y ago
      So he's really missing the power over other people, which those officials have, at least in their small respective domains. It's always the same struggle for power.
  - glenra 16y ago
    Maybe he's more worried about freedoms missing from your life.
  - warrenwilkinson 16y ago
    Maybe he is scared. Governments change, many civilization's have been left poor and defenseless by politicians. Seeking liberty is a form of self defense.
BerislavLopac 16y ago
And this is precisely the reason why this is utopia. You see, power and money are related to each other pretty much like matter and energy: they are two forms of the same thing, interchangeable from one into the other, and behaving in mostly the same ways. As long as there is some power to accumulate you will find some people who are better ad doing it than the others, and you're getting a power imbalance which is easily abused. So there is no guarantee that any nicely engineered utopia won't become warped after a while -- if anything, human history pretty much guarantees that it will. Human society can't be engineered, it's a living mechanism, and in the past millennia we've been through pretty much all we could (although that heavily depends on technological advances, such as communications and the like). So far, we can safely say that there are two extreme forms of society when it comes to laws: a totalitarian state, where a small group of people keep the rest in control, and a total anarchy, where there are no set laws and rules. At each point in time, any society is at some point between those two extremes, and the larger the society it's more probable that different rules apply to various subdivisions within it. So no, it is not possible to set up an ideal society (of any form, libertarian or socialist or whatever) and keep it such for a long time -- unless perhaps for very small, heavily regulated and closed groups, isolated from the rest of society which tolerates them (as is often the case with religious cults and small but wealthy totalitarian countries).
- tgflynn 16y ago
  it is not possible to set up an ideal society (of any form, libertarian or socialist or whatever) and keep it such for a long time Human society is probably the most complex system in the known universe. How can you understand it well enough to claim that no better configurations exists ? Of course your use of the word "ideal" gives you an out since that is an absolute asymptotic concept, similar to that of "God", which bears no relation to any observable reality. For my part I believe that solutions exist to the organization of human society which are undeniably better than the tiny set that has so far been tried in the short history of human civilization.
  - BerislavLopac 16y ago
    "Better" is a most relative concept, grasshopper.

guelo 16y ago

I definitely don't think the existing governments are fine, there's tons of things that make me rage about the state of things. My point was that if you want to (unpatriotically) give up on your country instead of trying to improve it, and you're rich, and you ignore language and culture (like the seasteading idea does), you have many other countries to pick from. Now if out of all the other countries in the world you can't find one that's even close to your ideals maybe there is a reason for that, maybe your utopia is not possible. Thiel as a CEO got to tell people what to do, he seems to have this idea that he will setup his government and people will just follow his rules. So I guess he's thinking of being some kind of benevolent dictator. In some other of his social writing* he has said he doesn't believe in democracy anymore. But even in a dictatorship you have to get consent from at least your security. In his effort to escape politics he doesn't seem to realize that politics is what happens when you get a lot of people together making decisions. What happens when charismatic socialist or conservatives leaders rise up in his country? What happens when special interests start competing with each other? If he were somehow able to solve the technical, economical, security and legal issues the whole thing would just devolve into the same political mess that every society goes through. How do I know? Because that's what happens everytime a government has been formed, it's what's happened to every single other country in the world. * http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/the-education-of-a-libertarian/ http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/the-educa...

arethuza 16y ago
What I wonder reading that article is what freedoms people like Thiel perceive are missing from his life - he is successful, immensely wealthy and living in what most people would regard as a free country.
- billswift 16y ago
  The freedom to avoid, rather than have to pretend to be respectful to, incompetent, arrogant, often obnoxious officials, like cops, TSA, zoning boards, code enforcement, etc, etc, ad nauseum?
  - arethuza 16y ago
    I really don't think many of things are a big problem for someone as wealthy as he is (e.g. private air travel avoids the TSA problem). I'm sure high powered law firms/lobbyists/political contributions could soon remove any problems in other areas.
  - BerislavLopac 16y ago
    So he's really missing the power over other people, which those officials have, at least in their small respective domains. It's always the same struggle for power.
- glenra 16y ago
  Maybe he's more worried about freedoms missing from your life.
- warrenwilkinson 16y ago
  Maybe he is scared. Governments change, many civilization's have been left poor and defenseless by politicians. Seeking liberty is a form of self defense.

BerislavLopac 16y ago

And this is precisely the reason why this is utopia. You see, power and money are related to each other pretty much like matter and energy: they are two forms of the same thing, interchangeable from one into the other, and behaving in mostly the same ways. As long as there is some power to accumulate you will find some people who are better ad doing it than the others, and you're getting a power imbalance which is easily abused. So there is no guarantee that any nicely engineered utopia won't become warped after a while -- if anything, human history pretty much guarantees that it will. Human society can't be engineered, it's a living mechanism, and in the past millennia we've been through pretty much all we could (although that heavily depends on technological advances, such as communications and the like). So far, we can safely say that there are two extreme forms of society when it comes to laws: a totalitarian state, where a small group of people keep the rest in control, and a total anarchy, where there are no set laws and rules. At each point in time, any society is at some point between those two extremes, and the larger the society it's more probable that different rules apply to various subdivisions within it. So no, it is not possible to set up an ideal society (of any form, libertarian or socialist or whatever) and keep it such for a long time -- unless perhaps for very small, heavily regulated and closed groups, isolated from the rest of society which tolerates them (as is often the case with religious cults and small but wealthy totalitarian countries).

tgflynn 16y ago
it is not possible to set up an ideal society (of any form, libertarian or socialist or whatever) and keep it such for a long time Human society is probably the most complex system in the known universe. How can you understand it well enough to claim that no better configurations exists ? Of course your use of the word "ideal" gives you an out since that is an absolute asymptotic concept, similar to that of "God", which bears no relation to any observable reality. For my part I believe that solutions exist to the organization of human society which are undeniably better than the tiny set that has so far been tried in the short history of human civilization.
- BerislavLopac 16y ago
  "Better" is a most relative concept, grasshopper.