02/05/25
The fight against drugs and drug cartels is just political rhetoric to justify regulation, border controls, and to collect bribes for looking the other way. It's not difficult to get hold of drugs for those who seek them, and people who don't use drugs know this well. (There are underground western-style parties with alcohol in Iran.)
Once the new country becomes strong, other countries who do not want imports from it can put up border controls. It will be their problem.
The only way to start a country is to have a situation in which it's not in any nearby country's political interest to be against it. This can never happen in a quiet place like United States or Canada, since this incentive is missing. It needs to be a somewhat conflicted region outside of US, in which a strong power like US or UK has an active interest.
I have outlined the approach in my article "How to Get Sovereignty," published on the Anthemism website.
https://anthemism.org/article/sovereignty/
I am looking forward to collaborating with the Thomas-Paine Institute think tank, since it fits well into the overall Anthemism umbrella (which I see as a future movement, or an "-ism," not a think tank).
04/26/25
I tried to contact the TPI initiative to get on the mailing list. It didn't work, no one got back to me. I tried it today again, and noticed that the homepage of the website has an advertisement and no content, while the contact form appears to be broken, giving "parse error" when I tried to submit a message.
On the other hand, I see photos of the founders on one of its pages.
https://thomaspaineinstitute.com/ap-leadership/
It's good to have older folks as advisors, but it's going to take younger energetic people to make this happen. I am 46, and I have so far assembled about 40 curious people around my age (not Objectivists) under the Anthemism umbrella. Let's work together, and maybe something will start moving.
Things are worse today than a year ago.
Here's a quote from Machiavelli ("The Prince," page 4, emphasis mine):
[The] Romans did in these instances what all prudent princes ought to do, who have to regard not only present troubles, but also future ones, for which they must prepare with every energy, because, when foreseen, it is easy to remedy them; but if you wait until they approach, the medicine is no longer in time because the malady has become incurable; for it happens in this, as the physicians say it happens in hectic fever, that in the beginning of the malady it is easy to cure but difficult to detect, but in the course of time, not having been either detected or treated in the beginning, it becomes easy to detect but difficult to cure. This it happens in affairs of state, for when the evils that arise have been foreseen (which it is only given to a wise man to see, they can be quickly redressed, but when, through not having been foreseen, they have been permitted to grow in a way that every one can see them, there is no longer a remedy.
To apply this argument to today's America, the malady is seen by many, but is difficult to cure. I think America will have to hit rock bottom first, before it can return to the path of freedom. Even the near future is bleak: three more years of Trump, plus four more of either J.D. Vance or reactionary democrats should they win (imagine DEI and BLM supersized).
Yet, I see no support from Objectivists for the idea of starting a new state somewhere, and this initiative cannot be accomplished by one man. (Compare: Theodore Herzl had a few early supporters, including Max Nordau.) The TPI last posted on Facebook a year ago. There are no public updates from Joseph Avatar, although he does have a closed Facebook group. (His idea was a floating ship as a country, which I judged to be a wrong direction, for land is absolutely needed.)
Bradley Foster writes earlier in this thread,
A major part of how and why our forebears were able to create the USA in the first place was that they had an entire continent that was largely unexplored and almost completely undeveloped with which to create the free and independent economic powerhouse that the USA became in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Now, however, I think that the Earth has been too completely explored and is too completely controlled by sovereign political entities for such a society to have any chance to survive anywhere on any of the other continents.
I doubt that it is what it seemed back then. This empty land was claimed by Britain, France, Spain as soon as colonies arrived, and it was similar to other undeveloped land that exists today which is under the jurisdiction of some countries. It took an armed rebellion to pry this land from Britain.
Harry Binswanger is concerned that a free country won't be allowed to exist, citing drugs and medical research as contention examples. But we have currently countries that are much better than their neighbors, and they are able to survive. They do so because the principle of checks and balances that works within a country to stop it from becoming a dictatorship has an analog internationally: the balance of interests of great powers serves to protect small countries from being taken over either by the protector or the neighbours.
Andorra is a tax haven that survives because it pits Catholic church (bishop from Spain) against France. Taiwan, a freer place than the adjacent China, survives because neither U.S. nor China will take it over. Israel, a freer country compared to its neighbors, survived because Western powers have interest in supporting it, but none would fully take over the region. Hong Kong, a freer region than China (and Britain), survived because neither China nor Britain would be able to fully control it. South Korea is adjacent to North Korea and China, but is not being taken over neither by them nor by U.S. or (perhaps) Japan. The pattern is that to a protector, a proxy state is more favorable than annexation.
The presence of tax havens alone shows that a freer region is tolerated by other countries, particularly the neighboring ones. Medical research is not a dealbreaker either. Research is not visible on the world stage and won't attract attention from the haters of the good until a big discovery is made of a groundbreaking new treatment or vaccine, which will be productized. But in this case, just as with Rearden Metal, the world will begrudgingly want to buy it, not seek to destroy a country that gave it birth. And, a conventional U.S. patent (which can be obtained by anyone living in the New America) will protect the inventor worldwide from blatant theft.
Herzl showed that only a few people are needed to move things forward politically. His core team was five to ten people. This can be done.
04/05/26
In addition to drugs and medical research, free banking is the bigger problem. It was pointed out by Yaron Brook again in his recent interview with Timothy Allen of Free Cities Foundation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZAE0NLniN8&t=3848s
At time code 1:04:11 Yaron asks a rhetorical question: how long would it take for the world navies to blow up a sea-stead that has free banking? He answers: “hours.” He says it’s different than Bitcoin, because Bitcoin has no locality and it’s harder to shut it down. It’s easier to blow a country, and so a new country or a sea-stead should be ready to defend itself from such attack. (I think sea-steads are indefensible structures, they can be sunk with torpedoes).
It’s important to detail the reasons why free banking would be a problem. For instance, why can’t it be that all internal transactions within “New America” happen with gold, while all international transactions with other country’s fiat over SWIFT? I brainstormed on this with ChatGPT. Apparently, international banks would boycott New American banks, for the fear to be tainted as receiving laundered money. That is because money can still be laundered within New America, wherein its internal market is an analog of the Bitcoin mixing service. (A Bitcoin mixing services allows to send in Bitcoin, and to receive an equivalent amount of from others’ accounts, thereby breaking chain-analysis.)
If international banks would refuse to receive SWIFT from a free country, then it would be impossible to import goods into it at volume. As consequence of boycott, exports also would be under sanction, for sending money into New America’s banks (a tax deductible expense for the buyer) would be a red flag inviting audits.
So if the new country has any kind of free trade at volume, it would have to appear favorable to world banks. At the minimum it must require a Know-Your-Client (KYC), which is a regulation. The banking regulations can necessitate further regulations on production, to make sure that investments are not a money laundering scheme (nil production, just money mixing). It becomes a slippery slope to statism.
What’s the counter argument? I don’t have a strong one. One point is that people living in New America don’t try to run away from high taxes, so they do not need numbered accounts: they are fine with money flows being traced. Unlike Switzerland, which allowed people to hide money from their home state, New America doesn’t need to play this role for the outer world. That would mean that all internal transactions must be traced, including deliberate money mixers, which would be (again) a regulation.
Isn’t cash in the same boat? Isn’t it an intermediary that allows money to mix? Yes and no: large amounts of cash are rejected by banks for deposits or withdrawals. (I once tried to deposit $15,000 cash to a new bank account and was refused. The branch owner found me suspicious, had a one-on-one talk with me, but still refused. He explained that it would have raised red flags on his branch to accept it. He returned me the $5,000 I deposited the day before, and closed my account.)
The mirror second point is that other countries are only concerned about tax evasion of their own residents. Once a person becomes a resident of New America (physically moves there), he is no longer tax liable in the former country. (Other reasons for money laundering are of criminal nature and can be caught by police by means other than following regulated accounting trails.) Since this is mostly about taxes, the situation is similar to the current situation: companies produce products offshore and sell domestically in the U.S., paying tax on revenue: this tax appears to be sufficiently large to allow the scheme to continue. With New America the situation will be similar, and stronger: the owner will sell products in U.S and pay the tax on revenue from sales in the U.S., but the headquarters will be in New America and of no interest re tax evasion to U.S.