08/20/21
As I mentioned in the MOTM last week, a better strategy is to get people who want capitalism to settle in a target geographical location to achieve a majority vote there. Just like Texas has a majority that subscribes to conservatism, and California has a majority that subscribes to liberalism, I'm proposing to create a spot in which the majority subscribes to capitalism. When there are enough people there, we could petition the host country to give us autonomy.
This chosen location should not be in the middle of another country, but on the edge of a country. For example, it can be the south corner of South Carolina. It is important for the location to have access to a sea or ocean, so that we could trade directly with other countries without requiring road access in the territory of the host country. It should also not be a location with inhospitable living conditions, such as a desert or a place with very cold winters. It also helps to have a river that can be used to generate hydroelectric power, if we ever need to have a power source independent from the host country.
This plan's advantage is that it does not require third-party investments. Each motivated person would merely buy a house there. It helps if we choose a location in which real estate is not expensive, so that houses could start as vacation homes. We would meet there, just like in Galt's Gulch, every summer, and enjoy meeting in person. It will be the capitalist version of Burning Man, to which all flock once a year. If we continue campaigning for Objectivism to create New Intellectuals, our settlement would turn into a town, then into a city.
Last but not least, whatever place we choose, it should allow online remote work at good salary rates. This could be accomplished if a benefactor company would hire people remotely out of the target area. For example, it could be an established Silicon Valley IT company, which would hire workers from the target remote location. This is not hard to find for a settlement in the United States, especially after Covid year in which the whole country was telecommuting. Many companies plan to continue to remain virtual only. It's a harder challenge if the chosen location is in a third-world country (such as the suggested Bohemia), since American companies hire remote workers from there for a quarter on the dollar. There is also a timezone issue.
What would prevent people with bad ideas moving there? In Atlas Shrugged, Galt's Gulch was kept secret using technology. In our case, it will be semi-secret, because people who do not value capitalism would not bother participating. By the time it became a city with a dominant ideology, it would be too late. It would be like the capitalist equivalent of Portland, a city whose ideology cannot be changed easily.
My call to action is that if you like the plan in principle, then help search and suggest a good geographical location. To summarize, the location needs to be isolatable, have low real-estate prices, pleasant weather, access to an ocean, a river for hydroelectric power, and must permit remote work at normal American salaries.
08/20/21
Joseph Avatar writes that libertarians collected 20,000 signatures promising to move to New Hampshire. I am not talking about merely signatures promising to move to a target location. I'm talking about buying real estate there. The purchase is the "signature."
It is true that the closest to Burning Man for objectivists is OCON. There are significant differences besides the underlying philosophy. Nothing material is demonstrated at OCON, it's intellectual only. Burning Man is a display of creativity and engineering, but at the end of the event, everything is either disassembled and removed or burnt. That's what happens when the event is powered by a nihilistic philosophy, and also when the real estate on which the event takes place is rented from the State.
The Galt's Gulch example from Atlas Shrugged shows how the place was incrementally improved and civilized, by visiting it every year for one month, and building on what was created the previous year. In the suggested scenario, people will visit their vacation homes annually and during each visit would take time to improve them. We could have OCONs there too, and it would allow those who have bought the vacation homes to make some money subletting rooms AirBnb-style. These intellectual conferences will provide an intellectual backdrop to the physical enterprise of settling the area.
Joseph also asks about success rates of petitions of autonomy. I do not know which autonomies became what they are without force. But, Quebec in Canada peacefully petitions for autonomy from Canada. No autonomy or country would have had any chance of forming, until enough of its would-be citizens have already lived there. For instance, Palestine was settled by Jews 50 years before Israel got independence as a Jewish state. It started by Jews buying real estate in Palestine and moving there.