A peek into the Libertarian Mindset: Seasteading

[formercia]


For years now, slow-news days have brought us the breaking news that the world’s richest people — and hence the world’s best — fed up with taxation, government regulation, and having to co-exist with the unwashed masses without hunting them for sport, are about to go off to live on a modified oil rig, a “project” known as ”seasteading”. Alternatively, they may inhabit a giant cruise ship.
On the surface, it looks like a perfect futuristic Galt’s Gulch, a cluster of manicured, pastel-colored apartment buildings separated from the world of “parasites” by the forbidding ocean, but yet within a safe distance of some friendly country, one that does not mind having billionaire excrement, broken champagne bottles, and an occasional dead body washing up on its beaches. There are no taxes to pay, no building codes, no labor laws, no zoning regulations, no legal protections for non-residents (you know, the cleaning staff) — a paradise.

--snip--

Economically, the best of circumstances would make a seastead similar to Dubai, all glittery Space Age on the surface, but built and sustained by huge armies of workers brought in from the Third World. In Dubai, such people are basically imprisoned by their employers and treated like slaves: enticed under false premises; made to work 14-hour days in hellish heat; fed in amounts barely adequate to sustain life; paid pennies, and sometimes not at all; housed in conditions eerily reminiscent of World War II-era concentration camps; not allowed to leave for years. Would seasteading masters be deterred by a risk of revolt? I think not. Worker revolts may be violent and spectacular, but that only masks the reality of how rarely they happen. There is a variety of relatively easy ways to make people tolerate slave-like conditions: bring together workers from disparate regions, so that cultural barriers impede cooperation; shuffle them around, constantly bring in new faces, keep the work force fluid, so that it is never stable enough for people to develop trust and cultivate the bonds necessary to enable them to stand up to those in charge.

http://thisruthlessworld.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/why-cant-seasteading-get-off-the-ground/

[Divine Discontent]

1. talk about a creepy existence. they probably figure they should head there before the 99% get tired

of them.

Also, those floating towns seem like the kind of setting where they end up just marrying each others kids and over a few generations they are inbred... or the kind of place some plague breaks out!


proposed artistic renderings of floating towns ---






WATCH THE ROMNEY UNLIKE DASH!
Just go to his page and watch the bandwagon fans UNLIKE their awesome candidate by refreshing a minute later to see his numbers drop!
https://www.facebook.com/mittromney

[No Elephants]

2. I think Romney looked better with his orange makeup.

Gave him a little individuality, it did.


Then again, I've always been partial to citrus.

[No Elephants]

3. Thank you, formerica.

Even though this is disgusting news, it is better to know it.

[formercia]

4. Those are some sick pups.

:hi: