5/27/2009 PERMALINK
Seasteading Institute announces winners of this year's design contest The old order's nation states seem a terribly flawed system. They seem to be forever spying on and infringing the rights of their citizens. They engage in costly and unnecessary conflicts and spend fortunes on things like research into bioweapons with the power to cause the extinction of our species. The services nation states deliver to citizens are routinely of inferior quality. And their efficiency is so abysmal that they turn their citizens into virtual slaves of the state by forcing them to pay taxes much higher than the 33% of their crops feudal lords took from their serfs. Moreover, instead of serving the common good, legislation and regulations often seem more targeted at serving the needs of a political connected elite, at the expense of most citizens.


Some, like the Seasteading Institure, think the best way to create a civilization 2.0 that treats humans with respect, is to avoiding the nation state model entirely by homesteading outside their jurisdiction either in outer space or on the high seas.


The images shown are from the more interesting of the winners of this year's Seasteading Institute annual design competition. The concept was created by a 22 years-old architecture student named Anthony Ling. And it illustrates an extremely interesting idea for maximizing human freedom by injecting real competition into the administration of our cities. Numerous proprietary communities of containerized living pods could be set up at sea. Community operators would be forced to provide highly efficient administration and real value for the fees paid by inhabitants, because if they failed to do so, inhabitants could just have their pods detached and moved to another better operated community.

The potential effectiveness of making governance truly competitive can be seen in the fierce competition between RV communities in places like Arizona and Florida. The highly mobile living pod inhabitants that are their customers must be given real value for their money. Imposition of the high fees or ridiculous and oppressive regulations, found in many communities with more captive populations, is made impossible by the mobility of the inhabitants.