Sovereignty May Be Boolean, But Freedom Isn’t
A couple of weeks ago Mencius Moldbug wrote a very substantive, lengthy (SHOCKER!) criticism of seasteading, which you should read if you haven’t already. He makes a variety of interesting arguments, which will require a number of posts to address, but we have to start somewhere.
Mencius writes:
There is no reason to think that any ship or structure, anywhere at sea, will be able to sustain any nontrivial infringement of US law – especially if any part of its organizational structure includes US persons or US entities…
…China and Russia are not new lacunae, and their quasi-sovereignty is maintained by one thing: military power. A seastead will never achieve military power, because it will never be allowed to start achieving military power. Terrestrial resistance to USG is conceivable under certain circumstances, preferably not including me. Naval resistance is inconceivable under any circumstance.
This is the demon-filled pit. The endgame problem with seasteading is that your “alternatives to government,” your pelagic argosies, will either become sovereign, or not. Sovereignty, like virginity, being boolean.
Until you have a realistic plan to become sovereign, you have no realistic plan to escape. You can spend all the time you want, and have all the fun you want, pretending to be free. Or planning to pretend to be free. In Washington, however, they know the difference – and always will.
There are a few issues here. First, there’s no particular explanation as to why the lack of absolute sovereignty means somehow that seasteaders won’t enjoy significant increases in the freedoms that they desire. Want to use drugs? The cops won’t barge in your door. Want to offer services that are prohibited in the United States? It’s not like the US has invaded Mexico over the fact that they sell Vicodin in Tijuana without a prescription. The degree to which the United States intervenes in the affairs of others decreases massively once you get outside of its jurisdiction.
That’s not to say that the USFG couldn’t stop seasteaders from being more free. Of course it could. The argument was, and has always been, that it won’t.
Now, there are some freedoms that seasteaders probably won’t be able to enjoy. Exporting drugs to the United States? Probably not. Molesting Children? Also unlikely.
It’s possible that Mencius considers the increases in freedom that people will realize “trivial.” But what the government considers trivial, and what individuals consider trivial are very different things. There are freedoms that the government will deny you within its jurisdiction, and allow you to have outside of it, and some individuals value those freedoms more than others. If the seasteading movement could help people access the specific freedoms that they value most, then it is an avenue worth pursuing.
Why Landlubbers Should Support Seasteading
At the TSI conference, Sean Hastings, founder of HavenCo, gave a fantastic talk about his experiences starting a data-haven on the offshore platform micronation of Sealand. One of the lessons he learned was just how difficult and dangerous living on the sea is. He often slept in a room next to one which housed a power generator; if the generator caught fire, it meant his probable death. A misstep during late night trip to the bathroom in the dark might mean falling down a long hatch and drowning. In the end, he lost a part of his idealism for self-sufficiency and accepted the fact that the nanny state would be a part of life.
I suspect that many people who are intrigued by the idea of seasteading feel the same way. The political incentives are great–competition between governments and all that–but they simply cannot picture themselves living on a seastead. They are risk averse, tempermentally conservative people who don’t want to give up their land-based creature comforts. Should they dismiss seasteading because they can’t picture themselves casting off one day? Should they turn their attention back to traditional forms of activism? No. A world with seasteading benefits everyone, and a world with a thousand nations is better for everyone, whether they live on a floating nation or terra firma.
Joe Lonsdale gave a talk about wealth creation on the ocean containing a graph demonstrating the relative costs of living on land vs the ocean. The x-axis was time; the y-axis was taxation. One line on the graph, the “government tax”, was rising steadily. Given the current economic state, people will likely embrace more government interventions, and given the deficits governments are accruing, taxes will have to be raised. The other line on the graph, the “ocean tax”, was falling steadily. Right now, the costs of living on the harsh environment of the ocean are high. As seastead production technology becomes cheaper, engineering knowledge grows, and economies of scale emerge, this “ocean tax” will continue to fall. (This graph will become clear once the videos are released.)
Right now, the ocean tax is greater than the government tax, but as the trends continue, there will come a time when the lines cross and living on the ocean will be cheaper than living on land. Lonsdale went a step further in arguing that we shouldn’t be so disheartened about enlarging government because one side-effect is hastening the time at which the lines cross.
At the right side of the graph, i.e., in the far future, the government tax which had thus far been increasing begins to decrease. As seasteading becomes a viable option for sovereignty, jurisdictional arbitrage, and discovery of optimal rules, land-based governments will have to adapt and change their policies or lose their citizens. In the far future, everyone wins, including those of us who get seasick in a pedalo. And that’s why landlubbers should support seasteading.
Paul Romer Q & A: Even Good Guy Mayors Are Powerless
Over at the Freakonomics blog, Dwyer Gunn asks the former Stanford professor about Charter Cities:
Q: Why will governments, particularly the entrenched, corrupt governments found in many countries, be willing to cede control of these zones?
Romer: First let me push back on an assumption that many people make and that seems to be implicit in your question. This assumption is that “bad guys” are why so many people are stuck living under bad rules. If you were a good guy and were the mayor of New York, would you be able to build enough consensus to implement congestion pricing for traffic, at least within our lifetimes? Or would you be strong enough to be able to coerce the people who don’t want it to go along?
Narratives about good guys and bad guys are always entertaining, but there is a deeper reason why people get stuck under bad rules. For those of us who live in the United States, it is easier to understand in a context like New York that is more familiar. It is quite possible that its existing political system will never allow an improvement like congestion pricing, and yet many people would happily move to a new city that had sensible pricing and smoothly flowing traffic at all hours of the day. Systems of rules are “sticky”; they are difficult for any leader or group to change.
Read the whole thing here.
Seasteading Conference 2009: How Many Countries in 2050?
It’s been great to meet everyone! Thanks for saying hi. For those of you unable to make it, TSI is working on getting the videos up soon. There were great talks by our team here–Michael Strong, Patri, and Will Chamberlain–and others from TSI and elsewhere in the seasteading universe. In his talk, Peter Thiel asked a good hypothetical about the future. How many countries do you think there will be in 2050 and how will that affect prosperity? Thiel noted that in 1945, there were about 50 countries and marginal tax rates in the US were 90 percent. Fast forward to 2009 and there are about 200 countries, with marginal tax rates in the US at 40 percent.
So the thought experiment asks, how many countries will there be in 2050? Greater or less than 250? And what does your answer say about economic growth? Take the poll:
Public Choice Watch: Fiscal vs. Monetary Stimulus
Scott Sumner may be good at macroeconomics, but he needs to brush up on his public choice theory. In the latest Cato Unbound, he has a long essay The Real Problem was Nominal, which argues:
The sub-prime crisis that began in late 2007 was probably just a fluke, and has few important implications for either financial economics or macroeconomics.[1] The much more severe crisis that swept the entire world in late 2008 was a qualitatively different problem, which has been misdiagnosed by those on both the left and the right.
I know very little about macro, and so I have nothing to say about this claim, or the economic arguments Sumner makes. But he does, unfortunately, stray into our area when he attempts to diagnose the reason for the US policy response (emphasis added):
Much of recent macro theory has focused on showing how and why monetary policy can be highly effective in a liquidity trap. Thus I was quite surprised to observe the general sense of powerlessness that seemed to grip the world’s central bankers as the crisis intensified last fall. In early October 2008, the world economy was in free fall, with forecasts of falling prices and output going well into 2009. And yet there was a general sense that monetary policy could do nothing to arrest this collapse, despite the fact that the Fed’s target rate was still 200 basis points above zero, and the ECB’s target rate was 425 basis points above zero. By the time the Fed cut rates close to zero in December 2008, almost all of the attention was focused on fiscal stimulus. How did this happen? Why did policymakers ignore what we teach our students in best-selling money and banking textbooks?
In The Economics of Money, Banking and Financial Markets, Frederic Mishkin says: “Monetary policy can be highly effective in reviving a weak economy even if short-term interest rates are already near zero.” [3]
In the next two sections I will trace out the series of errors that led to this policy failure.
Um…maybe because policymakers are playing the game of “Accumulate wealth and power”, not the game of “Correctly understand economics and fix the economy”?
Sure, inasmuch as Sumner is talking about the views held by macroeconomists, he may be right about the importance of macroeconomic theory and history. But when it comes to explaining why the US Government might choose fiscal rather than monetary stimulus, his eyes are missing the elephant in the room. Policymakers are not selfless maximizers of the utility of the American people. They are humans, much like the rest of us, maybe a bit smarter, taller, and hungrier for power, maybe even a bit more public spirited, but angels they are not.
And it seems pretty clear to me that fiscal stimulus offers dramatically greater scope than monetary stimulus for politicians to personally benefit. In a stimulus or bailout bill, hundreds of billions of dollars are redistributed via thousands of pages of legislation, offering enormous scope for catering to special interests, rewarding key voting blocs, directing money to swing districts, rewarding supporters, and everything else that is the bread and butter of life as a politician. Whereas simple changes to the money supply, whether by QE, price of money, or changes to interest rates, have much broader effects. They may reward some groups at the expense of others, but the groups are far larger (“debtors”, “creditors”, “Treasury bondholders”), and there is far less flexibility in allocating the rewards.
I can certainly understand how the assumption of honest striving for truth and justice is more pleasant a framework to operate in than the messy selfishness of the real world. This is presumably one reason why Professor Sumner is a professor and not a businessman or (God forbid) a politician. But an economist should know better than to assume away rational self-interest, and it distresses me how often in this post-public choice age people still make this basic error. Frederic Mishkin operates under a dramatically different incentive structure than a policymaker – why would anyone be surprised that he reaches different conclusions and advocates different policies?
There may be other reasons besides individual selfishness why policymakers chose fiscal over monetary stimulus, but surely the self-interest of the policymakers should be where we start the analysis.
Seasteading: More American Than America
On a radio show yesterday, I was asked whether seasteading is an unpatriotic activity for an American. There are three major reasons why I believe that founding new countries on the frontier better matches the country’s founding principles than its current form of government.
Be The Solution
One criticism often made is that seateading is unpatriotic because it is “cutting and running” rather than reforming the current system. I find this viewpoint quite amusing, considering that America was founded by people who “cut and ran” from systems in Europe that they did not think they could reform. As one obscure piece of paper in the country’s history states:
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
In other words, the point of government is to make people happy, and if it ain’t doing the job, it is not only our right but our duty to make a better one. America was not founded as a nation of whiners, bitching on barstools about how the King was exploiting them. It was founded by people who saw problems with their current system of government, and responded by throwing it out and building a new one. Same goes for seasteading – except without the violence. Whether you call it “cutting and running” or “Being the change you want to see in the world”, experimenting with new forms of government is truly American.
Federalism
The first article of the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War, begins with:
Article 1: His Brittanic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz., New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be free sovereign and independent states, that he treats with them as such, and for himself, his heirs, and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety, and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof.
The war was not won by a country, but by thirteen sovereign and independent states. America was thus founded as a loose collection of independent local regions, bonded together for a small set of purposes – to ensure for defense, a common currency, and a few others – which were explicitly limited:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Since it’s founding, America has moved more and more towards a centralization of power in the federal government, with major leaps such as the Civil War, the Great Depression, WWII, and more recently the financial crisis. We will dispense for now with judgment of the morality or practical consequences of this phenomenon, and merely say that it is not what we seek. We want a return to a loose federation of small, independent states – which was the original basis for these United States. Those who prefer the modern system are welcome to stay and enjoy it.
Frontier
Frederick Turner’s 1893 thesis The Significance of the Frontier in American History is summarized by Wikipedia:
Turner set up an evolutionary model (he had studied evolution with a leading geologist), using the time dimension of American history, and the geographical space of the land that became the United States. The first settlers who arrived on the east coast in the 17th century acted and thought like Europeans. They encountered environmental challenges that were different from those they had known in Europe. Most important was the presence of uncultivated arable land. They adapted to the new environment in certain ways — the cumulative effect of these adaptations was Americanization. According to Turner, the forging of the unique and rugged American identity had to occur precisely at the juncture between the civilization of settlement and the savagery of obliteration. The dynamic of these oppositional conditions engendered a process by which citizens were made, citizens with the power to tame the wild and upon whom the wild had conferred strength and individuality.
Successive obliterations moved further inland, shifting the lines of settlement and wilderness, but preserving the essential tension between the two. European characteristics fell by the wayside and the old country’s institutions (e.g. established churches, established aristocracies, intrusive obliterations, and class-based land distribution) were increasingly out of place. Every generation moved further west and became more American, more democratic, and as intolerant of hierarchy as they were removed from it. They became more violent, more individualistic, more distrustful of authority, less artistic, less scientific, and more dependent on ad-hoc organizations they formed themselves. In broad terms, the further west, the more American the community.
Turner’s thesis quickly became popular among intellectuals. It explained why the American people and American government were so different from Europeans. It sounded an alarming note about the future, since the U.S. Census of 1890 had officially stated that the American frontier had broken up. The idea that the source of America’s power and uniqueness was gone was a distressing concept.
In addition to this date of 1890, note that Arizona, the last contiguous state to join the US, joined in 1919. I find it quite striking that the greatest point of demarcation in the size and scope of government in US history then occurred in 1929-1933. As Free To Choose says:
From the founding of the Republic to 1929, spending by governments at all levels, federal, state, and local, never exceeded 12 percent of the national income except in time of major war, and two-thirds of that was state and local spending. Federal spending typically amounted to 3 percent or less of the national income. Since 1933 government spending has never been less than 20 percent of national income and is now over 40 percent, and two-thirds of that is spending by the federal government.
While this single temporal correspondence is far from being a complete or proven historical theory, it provides at least some evidence that Turner’s distressing concept may have been correct. Once America lost its frontier, in a single generation it lost its nature as a country of individualism and local autonomy.
Again, those who prefer the maternalism and paternalism of the modern state are welcome to it. We try not to judge, except to say that this type of society is not for us. We prefer the traditions of America’s fiercely independent first century, when its identity was centered around the struggle to tame the frontier. Which is why we seek the next frontier – the oceans.
Conclusion
America has changed over the last 233 years, and it appears that for many of its modern residents, the modern form of government and culture is preferable. It is no longer a nation of pioneers, and that is why we do not seek a revolution or even a peaceful restoration of the Republic. But those of us searching for a new frontier can rest content in the knowledge that we are not betraying our country, but rather taking up the guttering torch of the early American spirit and carrying it to a new land where it can burn brightly once again.
Tariffs as Tokens
Protectionism is back! On Friday evening, the Obama administration put in place a 33% tariff on Chinese tires. Here at ATN, we’re well versed in the problem of democratic failure – how special interests co-opt reform, and how being right simply isn’t enough to get proper policies passed. But this policy is such a gaping vacuum of stupid that it requires more thorough analysis.
At first glance, this would seem like your classic special-interest driven policy. The logic of collective action demonstrates that small groups have a far easier time organizing and acting in their collective interests than do large groups. Clearly, domestic tire producers are a small group, that would stand to gain significantly by the passage of this policy, while taxpayers are a large, dispersed group, who will bear a large, but dispersed cost.
But the interesting thing about this policy is – the tire producers didn’t even want it. Really! They didn’t put any pressure on the Obama administration to put this tariff in place. The tariff was requested by the United Steelworkers, a group that really doesn’t have a financial interest at stake in the matter at all. And yet, because the USW was behind the policy, the Obama administration fell in line.
Obama giving the USW this tariff is the equivalent of a husband giving to flowers to his wife – it’s just a token, a symbol of the power that USW still has to influence policy, and the “love” that the Obama administration has for unions. And it just goes to show how little political pain there is in imposing a small cost on a very large group of people – that the Obama administration could afford to do it just to take a symbolic stand with a union.
(HT: Shadow Government)
The Framework is Libertarian, But Any Community Within It Need Not Be
Is There Really One Kind of Life Which Is Best For Each of These People?
Yesterday, I introduced Nozick’s utopian thought experiment. It’s a fanciful tale in which you have to power to act like Nightcrawler: in the event you do not particularly value the world you find yourself in, you can teleport yourself instantaneously to another world. You also have the godlike power to create a better world to teleport to. Nozick’s conclusion is that no individual would countenance living in a world that took more from him than he received. Despite outrageous assumptions, what emerges is a competitive market for association, one that eliminates free-riders and negative externalities.
Of course, you may say Nozick’s a dreamer, but he’s not the only one:
Not one lyric in the entire song about exit! But I am the walrus!…Because, just imagine, it might be a nice place to visit, but not to live….Anyway, if we admit the virtues of a framework for utopia, what would it look like in real life? What would be its closest approximation?
Well, for starters, we’d have to find ways to reduce the cost of exit and entry. We also need more options (see, Seasteading, Charter Cities, and Free Zones.) And unlike the thought-experiment, there’s no way to dream away externalities. Communities impinge upon each other. There will have to be some method of adjudicating disputes. Another problem involves the costs of gathering information on potential communities, what they’re like, how people fare in them. The list continues: there’s a possibility that members of a community will lie and keep its members in the dark as to what life on the outside is like. (Think M. Night Shamalama Ding Dong’s The Village.) Disbanding some communities is easier said than done.
This little gadanken appears harmless enough. Ridiculous, yet informative–it illustrates how the power of exit creates an efficient market for public goods. Unfortunately, not everyone values exit this highly. Some define freedom by voice. Others, like Patrick Deneen, want to tighten the screws on entrapment:
This, in a microcosm, is a central paradox of our political system: our cosmopolite meritocrats theoretically admire localism but abhore [sic] the idea of living within the confines that such life would entail; our Red-State locals tend to despise cosmopolites, but support (and vote for) an economic system that encourages borderlessness, placelessness, and a profoundly abstract economy that has the effect of eviscerating those very localities. This arrangement is one of the central features undermining the localist cause today, and it’s difficult to see how it will be reversed.
Deneen doesn’t consider whether or not these places are worth living in. Evidently one bed would have been enough for Goldilocks. And at the Front Porch Republic Jeremy Beer writes:
We need to encourage people, especially young people, to think about location (”location vs. vocation” would be a nice catchphrase to popularize), and to burden the question of location — of place — with the weight of ethical importance, rather than treating it as yet one more consumer decision to be made and thus submitting it only to the usual financial criteria.
This is small beer, but he concludes:
Discourage mobility!-a good ironic bumper sticker for someone to create.
Let us distinguish three kinds of utopian visionaries. First, there are imperialistic utopians. They believe it is morally desirable to coerce everyone into one pattern of community, namely their own. Missionary utopianism sticks to one boring position community, but adherents do not force others to accept it. Instead, they hope to peacefully persuade or convince others. Existential utopians merely hope for their preferred community to exist and be viable, so that those who wish for such arrangements can attain them. So long as their longed for community exists, they live and let live.
Missionary and existential utopians ought to support the real world correlatives of Nozick’s framework. Imperial utopians, not so much.
Having seen tidbits of Obama’s speech on healthcare, I believe it’s safe to say he’s an imperialistic utopian. I can’t speak for Patrick Deneen, Jeremy Beer or Charles Taylor, for that matter. But their views come close to communitarian imperialism.
What kind of people do these imperialists think we are? Given how people differ in personality, in desires, aspirations, intellectual abilities, and proclivities, given how heterogeneous we all are in nature, it’s absurd to conclude there’s one and only one community that would be ideal for everyone to live in. Even worse would be to assume that wherever you happen to be born is best.
Nozick asks us to consider these theses:
I. For each person there is a kind of life that objectively is best for him.
- People are similar enough, so that there is one kind of life which objectively is the best for each of them.
- People are different, so that there is not one kind of life which objectively is best for everyone, and:
- The different kinds of life are similar enough so that there is one kind of community (meeting certain constraints) which objectively best for everyone.
- The different kinds of life are so different that there is not one kind of community (meeting certain constraints) which objectively is best for everyone (no matter which of these different lives is best for them.)
II. For each person, so far as objective criteria of goodness can tell (insofar as these exist), there is a wide range of very different kinds of life that tie as best; no other is objectively better for him than any one in this range, and no one within the range is objectively better than any other. And there is not one community which objectively is the best for the living of each selection set from the family of sets of not objectively inferior lives.
I find these distinctions most illuminating. What do you assume about others? Below the weaknesses of many political philosophies lies an assumption on how simple and homogeneous humans are.
Robert Nozick’s Framework For Utopia
“Only a failure of imagination, the same one that leads the man on the street to suppose that everything has already been invented, leads us to believe that all of the relevant institutions have been designed and that all of the policy levers have been found.”–Paul Romer, New Goods, Old Theory, and the Welfare Costs of Trade Restrictions
Since the year it was published, a preponderance of the scholarship devoted to Nozick’s Anarchy, State, And Utopia has focused on the first two thirds of his 1974 book. The first third, devoted to justifying the minimal state, has attracted the attention of anarchists and fellow libertarians. The second third is catnip for the disciples of John Rawls–Nozick uses a sketch of the common law based on (unsupported!) assumptions to illuminate some iniquities inherent to redistributing wealth. That bit has drawn fire from all comers for years. In fact, the book is now known mainly for these sections. A cottage industry was born. You can earn yourself a PhD writing on Anarchy and State, but not Utopia, getting pats on the head if you point out that Nozick never justifies his notion of “rights.” (The Experience Machine is still a magnet as well, again earning yourself bonus points if you say Nozick doesn’t think about fantasy worlds at the margins.)
This party upfront is extremely unfortunate–the last third of his book is a cascade of fireworks on competitive government, a reinvention of a theory of clubs, and is far more rewarding than the previous sections. It deserves more attention than this.
Like James Buchanan, I find Nozick’s vision for a utopia of utopias wonderfully attractive and convincing. Since many of its arguments support our mantra (let a thousand nations bloom!), I think it’s worth revisiting in greater detail.
How to Avoid a Failure of Imagination: Go Meta!
Nozick begins the last third of his book with some thoughts on utopian intellectual history: why is it that the minimal state, one limited to the narrow functions of protecting property rights, contracts and so on–why doesn’t this minimalist vision seem to inspire any struggle and sacrifice? Why is all the love, passion and devotion left for those wily goateed radicals? Cannot the minimal state inspire?
All the same, many utopias demonstrate a poverty of imagination. We may admire the fervor motivating utopians, but so-called utopias quickly degenerate into dystopias. In short, why on God’s green earth are so many descriptions of utopia limited at best and morally repulsive at worst? The Cyclops raged against “no man”; political pipe-dreamers sing about “no place.” Is that historical irony? To quote Alexander Gray, “No utopia has ever been described in which any sane man would on any conditions consent to live, if he could possibly escape.”
But still, it’s worth considering, What is the best of all possible worlds for all of us to live in? What is the best world imaginable for each of us? And does a minimal state framework have any important connection to that world?
“Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.”–G.B. Shaw
So Nozick proposes a fanciful thought experiment:
Imagine a possible world in which to live; this world need not contain everyone else now alive, and it may contain beings who have never actually lived. Every rational creature in this world you have imagined will have the same rights of imagining a possible world for himself to live in (in which all other rational inhabitants have the same imagining rights, and so on) as you have. The other inhabitants of the world may choose to stay in the world which has been created for them (they have been created for) or they may choose to leave it and inhabit a world of their own imagining. If they choose to leave your world and live in another, your world is without them. You may choose to abandon your imagined world, now without its emigrants. This process goes on; worlds are created, people leave them, create new worlds, and so on.
There are two important assumptions in the model. First, the cost of emigration, of exit, is zero. That’s the beauty of the imagination! The second point is that the cost of new world creation is also zero. Not only do you have the power of costless exit, you also have the god-like power of creation. Granted–these are far from real world constraints. And yet the thought experiment asks an important question: will any patterns emerge from this fanciful process of exit and creation? Will any of the worlds that pass the test of time share any features?
Yes, Nozick says–in a stable world, “none of its inhabitants can imagine an alternative world they would rather live in, which (they believe) would continue to exist if all of its rational inhabitants had the same rights of imagining and emigrating.”
Another way to approach this is to consider the opposite, the worst of all possible worlds. What would that world look like? Maybe this will help clarify the point. Public goods theorists talk about “rival goods” and “non-rival goods.” Rival goods are limited in nature. Since these are scarce, people become rivals in attempts to attain and consume them. Your enjoyment of a rival good means I lose the opportunity of enjoying it myself. Whereas non-rival goods do not diminish. They are abundant goods, no matter how many people use them. Think of the information a useful equation represents. No matter how many people use it, it does not diminish in value. The same can be said for a radio broadcast: additional listeners do not diminish the value of the radio program. The good is not used up with consumption. Neither of these concepts is to be confused with “excludability,” which is pretty straightforward. If we are able to wall off some people from using a good, whether rival or non-rival, then it satisfies this condition. Exclusion isn’t all or nothing. It admits of degrees.
Now back to the worst of all possible worlds. If public goods theory speaks of the good, then let us consider the public bad. From this view, we will have rival and non-rival evils: a non-rival evil is one that does not diminish in its awfulness however so much it is inflicted. Think of wealth-destroying corruption throughout an entire society. If I suffer at the hands of a corrupt society, that does not diminish your opportunity to suffer from it either. And instead of excludability, the correlative concept shall be entrapment. Instead of the power to keep out, the public now has the power to keep in. This also admits of degrees. Being a slave is worse than being a citizen who cannot leave, but both are bad. Obviously the idea of negative externalities dovetails nicely here–the subset of people suffering from pollution along a river suffer from a non-rival bad (where we can say those faraway from the river are not entrapped). If everyone suffers, and no one can leave, they are fully entrapped. We can map it this way:
| PUBLIC EVILS | Rival bad | Non-rival bad |
| 100 Percent | Poison, Mein Kampf | Tyranny, despotism |
| High Inflation | ||
| Dianetics | Corruption | |
| Degree of Entrapment | ||
| Voting on what I may do. | Voting on what all may do. | |
| 0 Percent |
What we see here is that the force of an evil is vitiated by a lower degree of entrapment. If we have the power of exit, whether the bad be rival or nonrival, it doesn’t matter. We need not suffer. And here we can get an idea of the worst of all possible worlds. It one where the degree of entrapment is complete and one in which those in power have access to the worst non-rival evils. We can call this world, East Berlin.
A Market for Value pluralism
Of course, what’s bad to me, need not be bad for you. As lovely as the Amish are to ponder, I would never want to live among them. The system of norms and values they live by would be a non-rival bad for me and anyone else like me who lives there. Not so for the Amish. Many a member of that community would say just the opposite. For that sort, the life of the community is a joyful non-rival good.
The beauty of Nozick’s thought experiment is that it shows the degree of entrapment is much more important, from a moral point of view, than the nature of the bad itself. What’s more, because the cost of exit is zero (meaning the degree of entrapment is also zero) and because the cost of creating new worlds is zero, the model creates a market that allows consumers to define worlds according to their own values. One man’s good is another man’s evil, but no one is worse off because of it.
Now according to the thought experiment, it may be that none of the inhabitants of the world I have created want to live with me. They would all prefer to live in a world without me. In that case, we see that the power to exclude is the same as the power to admit. At a whim (but with due consideration), they can all exit my world and create one without me.
How to Back into Competitive Government
No world will admit someone if that person takes more from the world than he gives to it. What he takes from a world is not the same as what he gets from it. Here, amid abundant utopia creation, we see the difference between value and cost. What a person takes from a world represents how much the inhabitants value what they give him. (If he asks for anything more than this, the inhabitants would deny him admission.) And there’s a corollary: what he contributes to the world represents how much he values his membership in it. (Otherwise, if the inhabitants asked for too much, he would leave.)
We can even imagine worlds competing with other worlds for the membership of particular people. The similarities between the thought experiment and a competitive market by now should be all but obvious. Nozick writes:
Many associations [worlds] competing for my membership are the same structurally as many firms competing to employ me. In each case I receive my marginal contribution. Thus, it seems, we have the result that in every stable association, each person receives his marginal contribution; in each world whose rational members can imagine worlds and emigrate to them and in which no rational member can imagine another world he would rather live in (in which each person has the same imagining and emigrating rights) which he thinks would endure, each person receives his marginal contribution to the world.
This is a most welcome convergence–the best of all possible worlds is really a framework for the imagination to run riot. Utopia is not one world–instead, it’s the power to costlessly exit and the power to costlessly create an infinite number of worlds. The framework, not any particular world within it, deserves the name utopia.
This post is way too long. Tomorrow, I’ll project Nozick’s model on to the real world, and then analyze its relation to seasteading, dynamic geography, Charter Cities, and everything else good under the sun. See you then!
Let A Thousand Nations Bloom 