In the June/July issue of German magazine Mare, President of The Seasteading Institute, Joe Quirk, was interviewed to talk about private, voluntary governance. While most of the article accurately represented our motives for building seasteads, there was one statement that needs clear correction:
“Trotzdem reicht der Einfluss der libertären Bewegung in den USA bis weit in die Partei der Republikaner. Die propagierte Staatsskepsis entspricht auch dem Denken vieler Firmen im Silicon Valley, die ebenfalls der Meinung sind, dass unternehmerische Entscheidungen besser funktionieren als langwierige politische Prozesse, die oft in Kompromissen enden. Am Ende ist der libertäre Traum nichts anderes als die radikale Umsetzung eines Diskurses der Verächtlichmachung des demokratischen Betriebs, wie er von Ex-US-Präsident Donald Trump betrieben wurde. Nach dem Motto: Um unsere Probleme zu lösen, brauchen wir nicht die Demokratie, sondern ihre Abschaffung.”
“Nevertheless, the influence of the libertarian movement in the USA reaches far into the Republican Party. The skepticism of the state that is propagated also corresponds to the thinking of many companies in Silicon Valley, who also believe that entrepreneurial decisions work better than lengthy political processes that often end in compromises. In the end, the libertarian dream is nothing other than the radical implementation of a discourse of contempt for democratic operations, as promoted by former US President Donald Trump. According to the motto: To solve our problems, we do not need democracy, but its abolition.” (emphasis added)
Advocates of private, voluntary governance do not have “contempt” for democracy. Above all, they respect any kind of governance that people choose voluntarily – by voting with their feet. Our priority is to develop governance structures that protect individual liberty and offer citizens a choice in which governance system will help them flourish.
That said, almost everyone would prefer to live under a government that protected one’s rights more than a government strictly ruled by majority vote. The founding fathers of the United States recognized this when they designed the U.S. with various limits on what majorities can do. The simplest to understand are the Bill of Rights, which among other things protect freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of conscience. A simple majority cannot remove or amend the Bill of Rights. And, famously, Donald Trump has often expressed the intent to violate these rights. Insofar as he achieves majorities in elections, he is actually an example of a populist politician who is more democratic than are the Bill of Rights – and yet most left-leaning Americans are horrified by his threatened violations of the Bill of Rights.
But we don’t need to get into the complexities of how to protect rights, which governments are more or less “democratic,” or any of the other complications. If people want to opt into a government, they may. For example, the Schengen Area is an area encompassing 29 European countries that have officially abolished border controls at their mutual borders. “Free movement of persons enables every EU citizen to travel, work and live in an EU country without special formalities. Schengen underpins this freedom by enabling citizens to move around the Schengen Area without being subject to border checks.” (Source: European Commission) Schengen Area citizens may freely move to any other nation in this area they want – but they do not thereby obtain citizenship and the right to vote. The fact is, people choose to move to the place where they will have the best life for themselves and their children. Every Schengen Area citizen who leaves their home nation, where they can vote, to live in another one, where they can’t, has decided that voting with their feet is more important than voting in an election. Likewise, every digital nomad and every immigrant who has not yet obtained voting rights likewise demonstrate that voting with their feet is more important than voting in an election.
Does this imply a “contempt” for democracy? Not usually, but that kind of immigration proves that one’s safety and access to opportunity is what really matters to nomads. Creating more choice of jurisdiction and more options among governments will allow people more options of where to live, and more opportunities to thrive.
Importantly, both private cities and seasteads could be solutions for the billion or so people globally who would like to emigrate from their current nation. Whether they want to move for economic reasons, or to escape violence or persecution, or because they’ve been refugees for years (or generations), we need to create thousands of new jurisdictions with higher quality law and governance – and the most salient issue is whether or not a government protects your rights.
It is of no solace to live under a government for which one votes in elections regularly – but where one might be killed or imprisoned arbitrarily, or have one’s property confiscated, or otherwise be at the whims of state authorities. The ideal of majoritarian elections is that they are likely to prevent the most egregious state abuses. Professor Amartya Sen of Harvard, for instance, argues that democracies are less likely to see mass famines. But the tyranny of the majority is also a reality. For instance, the U.S. treated African-Americans as second class citizens long after they had obtained the vote.
In order to create a better world, we need both more vision and more sophistication regarding the diverse ways that governments are structured. It is well known that there are numerous voting systems beyond one person, one vote. Ranked preference voting is one, quadratic voting is another, and there are many more. The reason that voting geeks have designed such systems is dissatisfaction with simple majoritarianism, which can lead to many pathological outcomes (see U.S. 2024 presidential election).
But that is just the tip of the iceberg of governance innovation. Consider Tom W. Bell’s “corrective democracy,” which limits elections to stopping bad policies. Thus precisely because of a concern that private governance may have the potential for abuse of rights, Bell proposes that citizens may vote to STOP a government from passing a harmful law. But only the private developer, and not the majority, can initiate legislation. This is designed to prevent tyrannies of the majorities from forming.
More important than voting, however, is ending sovereign immunity. The fact that governments cannot typically be sued allows for truly egregious government abuse. For instance, there have been filmed incidents of police killing people (black, white, and other) in the U.S. but the police officers are almost never penalized and the families of the murdered citizens have no recourse. In short, police can get away with cold blooded murder. The fact that one can vote is no solace at all when one’s loved one has been murdered.
But in Prospera, the ZEDE in Honduras, the government may be sued in a court of third party arbitrators. The government is therefore just as subject to the laws as is any other citizen or entity. This is a more powerful force against government abuse than is the fact of voting.
So which would you prefer:
- A jurisdiction in which you had the right to vote but no legal protections for your rights in a nation with such bad economic policies that you and your children are likely to be poor forever.
- A jurisdiction in which you have significant protections for your rights and huge opportunities for upward mobility – but you can only vote against the government’s bad policies.
The first circumstance easily covers a billion or more people on earth today. The latter circumstance is what advocates of private cities and seasteads are working to build.
Journalists and commentators tend to throw around the word “democracy” as if the right to vote is the magic button of making a just and fair society. Advocates of private cities and seasteads value liberty, self-governance, human flourishing and it takes more than the right to vote to achieve those goals. The right to vote has not eliminated corruption from existing land governments. We are developing better governance structures where the people in positions of power cannot use their positions to harm the citizens, because the citizens can hold them accountable.
Michael Strong serves on The Seasteading Institute Board and has been active in the broader Startup City/Charter City space for more than twenty years. He is the author of The Habit of Thought: From Socratic Seminars to Socratic Practice and lead author of Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World’s Problems, which outlines the impact of both governance innovation and subculture creation. He is the founder and CEO of The Socratic Experience, a virtual school based on his work.
