link to original reddit post by /u/Anen-o-me

Hear me out.

I like to think about how an actual libertarian society could actually work and be structured, not the least of which because I am actively engaged in actually building them through my efforts in seasteading---someday I expect to offer us a way out for those who want it.

Coronavirus has made clear another aspect we will have to deal with: the coordination problem.

Much of why the non-libertarians tend to dismiss libertarianism as not serious or unworkable is because they quickly think about problems society faces that are coordination problems and then they tend to conceptualize a libertarian society as one without laws, where one person is akin to a king or an island, and where everyone would do their own thing without regard for others, and especially without any tools to coordinate with others when needed. And this seems unrealistic.

However, group coordination is only a challenge for a libertarian society, it is not insurmountable.

Our critics dismiss the concept while being mostly ignorant of the solutions we have already developed. Even many libertarians are ignorant of these coordination solutions and thus ineffective at explaining them to a skeptical audience.

For instance, an ancap society would have laws, private laws, yes, absolutely. Not because it has to, but because it's a proven solution to the group coordination problem of how do we organize a society and codify norms and expectations, etc.

Private law is conducted on the basis of private contract. Private cities would therefore be founded on contractual agreements of all with all. This doesn't mean the city has an owner, as some mistakenly believe, but rather that each person who enters that city is considered a private and independent person who freely chose and consented to the rules of that city, or they don't enter and aren't allowed to enter. The "private" adjective denotes the idea of statelessness, not that some corp or individual owns that city.

Similarly with taxation, most people encountering libertarian rhetoric against taxation cannot imagine any alternative. So they imagine a society without any of the things currently paid for by taxes and reject their imaginings.

But a private city can do anything a State is currently doing without taxation through consent-to-fees for service. Yes, you could even have a private city with a systematic welfare system codified in the laws of that city. If everyone agreed to set aside X portion of their income or whatever.

Since most libertarians don't know this, they tend to push things like the idea of private charity, which others often scoff at. But charity is not the only recourse, we can have cities that require systematic donations even on an income basis for certain purposes, but it will have to be something each person chooses to subject themselves to and cannot force on anyone that doesn't want to be part of it. Which is fine. You opt out of paying for it and you also opt out of any chance of benefits. Most people would probably still be willing to pay for social safety nets, though probably not ones as wasteful as we have today.

And in saying these things I have often had people say, well then that's no different from now and why even bother.

But they're missing the incredible, massive difference in doing things this way: **consent, individual choice!*"

A society that respects INDIVIDUAL consent would be the first truly ethical society in human history, and our ambition is to build nothing less than that!

Our hope is that we can soon build a prototype libertarian society and that it would become a beacon of hope for all the world yearning for freedom and opportunity.

That is why seasteading is my preferred location to build these systems, the ocean has enough room for many billions of people to move there and live for the foreseeable future. And they will want to move there!

Would you and I, hardcore libertarians, choose to live in a free city with no welfare guarantees, etc? Yeah, of course. But there needs also to be a transitionary period for people used to a certain kind of lifestyle.

A society of liberty will naturally and intrinsically encourage people to once again become rugged individualists, so I would expect the children and grandchildren of today's people living in a libertarian society to live increasingly in a libertarian manner in such a society. To take increasing advantage of the ability to create and live in custom law societies.

Take the coordination problem that is regional defence, often cited as a problem for a libertarian society because of the incentive to free-ride.

But Friedman solved it decades ago with majority contracts, the idea that a contract only takes effect if the majority of people in a region individually agree to take part, say 95% with 5% hardship allowances.

Similarly it's very likely that libertarian societies would share their blackball and crime lists so that people who are proven bad actors cannot just jump cities. One of the best things about a private city is access control, you don't have to let convicted criminals back into your society ever again where they can become recidivist offenders. This will tend towards massive reductions in crime and massive increases in security, which everyone wants and which the State cannot give you.

So, to make libertarian society work we need to test out and mature some new solutions to various coordination problems, then we can realistically claim that the libertarian alternative is a complete and viable replacement for the state.

I hope some of you will join me in seasteading one day soon to prove this very thing. We can change the world, we can destroy everyone's belief in the need for the state, but we have to build it first. And they will let us build it because they think the task impossible and thus doomed to fail in its own, requiring no intervention from them.