I’ve been interested in intentional communities since college so let them at it and good luck. Most intentional communities fail, some manage to find their feet and survive (Twin Oaks jumps to mind http://www.twinoakscommunity.org). But I don’t see a community united by greed working out, but let them try it. As to grunt work, there are models that work today in various countries: import workers, never allow them to be citizens, treat them as you wish. And all countries need to pass laws that will prohibit them from providing any assistance to these “nations” in times of trouble (I’m thinking pirates and natural disasters). But I suspect over time most of their populations will be people desperate for money and willing to do anything. But I could be wrong.
People who want to set up their own little fiefdoms usually do not have the personality to pull something like this off…but it would be appealing to some cults, I am sure…
Anyone wondering exactly how grim working in such a libertarian paradise would be just needs to go get a job on a cruise ship.
I did not read the article (hey… I’ll read the article when one of these things is actually going to exist) but people’s overwhelming negativity about the idea surprises me. Personally I think one of these would be really cool. Cloning shit? Hell yeah. Stem Cell research? +1. So. Many. Interesting. Substances.
Also, Bloomberg: eBoy called, he wants his stolen aesthetic back.
Xeni’s title is almost more informative than the whole linked article. Notice the s on the word “nations.” Patri’s idea is that libertarians can’t change the world by theorizing, something has to be done, some things, plural, because to find successful ways for communities to run, different ways need to be tried and compared in practice, compete to attract people and businesses.
So much information in the comments here, about what libertarians really want. I must be the one naive libertarian who’s going to end up doing all the work while the other 99 libertarians I know now, are counting their bitcoins, rubbing their hands together, smoking cigars and so forth.
I’m thinking bickering and recriminations is the most likely outcome.
When something goes wrong - fire, hurricane, catastrophic structural failure due to corners being cut during construction (“we don’t need no stinkin’ regulations!”), whatever, I hope they don’t expect help from the U.S. Coast Guard or Navy. I don’t want my tax dollars wasted on those freeloaders.
but the reason that theorizing has been the modus operandus thus far, is that all the thinking happens outside of existing reality. That’s why they have to start from scratch. All the theories only work in a vacuum, and can’t be integrated into the human world, with all it’s messiness.
Why worry? The market offers solutions – disgruntled workers are free to seek compensation for their skills elsewhere!
Such as, right over here, off the port bow, there’s a whole school of sharks offering immediate interviews.
What no longer interested in resigning? That’s too bad – if you had stayed on, we could have grandfathered in your existing wage. The new wage policy is “we don’t throw you off the port bow.”
(source)
When I was 18 I joined a ship that was run by an Evangelical missionary organisation. Not defending it, I wouldn’t do it again (I probably wouldn’t even be welcome to work there as I’m not a Christian any more), but it did have some pretty cool aspects to it as an intentional and international community.
Everybody including crew and staff was a volunteer and paid a level of support based on their country of origin (so an American might be charged $700/month while someone from Mongolia paid $150/month). Families and long termers (longer than 2 years) had a little better conditions, but basically you had food, accommodation in a small cabin with some others and $20/month pocket money for small items you found on your travels. There was an authority structure (both the standard, legally required one for running a ship and one in charge of the personnel). Every adult had a job which you could change after a few months, but not switch around from day to day. You worked 40 hours per week, had one day of ‘ministry’ (anything from speaking at a church to painting an orphanage to distributing aid) and one day off. Most of the 300-350 people on board stayed for two years, although some joined for 3 months or just one port (about 1-2 weeks), while others had been there for over a decade. The average age was probably about 25-30. While quite a bit of the funding came from personal support for staff members and general support for the ships, there was a bookshop on board that sold about 40% Christian titles and 60% educational books. Some countries like China invited us in exclusively as a cultural exchange program; in these cases we removed all Christian books, had no Christian program and didn’t mention Christianity at all unless specifically asked.
I think it worked partly because there was a broadly shared belief system, as much equality as possible and money basically wasn’t involved in your daily life or motivation. I think the last point was especially important and was helpful anyway, as you learned to develop more healthy motivations for work than income and someone from a poor background in the Philippines was more or less on the same level as a well-off person from Europe - or at least until laptops, digital cameras and credit cards became more common. You might get an announcement at 11pm that a refrigerated 40ft container of food had just arrived and couldn’t wait for the morning, could any volunteers come to help unload it for 2-3 hours? 50 people who could otherwise be relaxing and had to work the next day would turn up because they knew if they didn’t, the others would have to work harder.
Leadership was also different because you couldn’t really get fired except in more extreme situations. Your boss couldn’t threaten you with much and couldn’t promise a bonus or anything for extra work as you weren’t being paid. There was a reasonably high turnover (about 20% every six months), so you could quickly reach positions of authority that would normally take years to get to. You also kept having to train others, which helped build community spirit and leadership skills. Even the director and other higher up leaders would only stay for 2-3 years, so there wasn’t as much of an embedded structure as in many companies. We often had a lot of respect for leaders because we knew they were giving up lucrative jobs to be there.
I did visit a couple of cruise ships while I was on board, they looked pretty flashy but the staff were miserable. Even the passengers thought we were lucky as we had longer stays in port and more freedom to do what we wanted. I agree that greed-based communities are unlikely to work out and will probably be pretty hellish places to live as a lower-level staff member. Even higher up the ladder I’m sure it would get pretty lonely as I can’t imagine it working well as a community.
You couldn’t pay me enough to go on a cruise.
I remember seeing a (BBC?) documentary/ reality show years ago about working on one. I think it was an unusual case but the deal was the staff were paid peanuts and given more work than they could possibly do on their own. The idea was that the guests would tip very heavily, and the staff could then sub contract other employees to help them do their job, paying them out of their tips. Crazy. Edit : I think it was the Back to the Floor episode referenced here by Adam Curtis.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/adamcurtis/2012/01/were_all_in_the_same_boat_-_ar.html
I see the first comment on that blog points back at Friedman…
That’s a fascinating read. Sadly, the article doesn’t seem to mention a number of ways that the lack of regulation is being exploited:
One crew member who was on board the Silver Shadow said that his superiors ordered him and other crew members to sleep with food inside their cabins.
Adriano Colonna, who had a 40-day contract to serve as a pastry chef on the vessel, said a trolley full of salami and even unrefrigerated blue cheese was stored in crew cabins. Colonna said food was hidden night after night to avoid health inspections.
(Source)
The company would like to point out that the ships have always been graded highly in the past, so presumably this was a freak occurrance. In this case they received a score of 82, which is only 2% below ‘satisfactory’.
Another indication of how much lives are valued when money is on the line:
Rebecca’s parents, Mike and Annmaria Coriam, flew from England to Los Angeles, where they met the Wonder upon its return to port. They have said that the Bahamanian detective told them that he had investigated for only one day, not several, and that he interviewed only a few crew members and no passengers. They also said that they were brought on board the Wonder only after the passengers had disembarked.
They said the captain told them he believed that Rebecca had been washed overboard from the crew pool area, a story they found implausible because of the high protective walls around it. (The crew pool is on Deck 5 of the ship.) They later met with Disney executives and with the woman with whom Rebecca had been talking on the phone. Later they were brought to her cabin and given her belongings.
http://www.internationalcruisevictims.org/LatestMemberStories/Rebecca_Coriam.html
Or child molestation:
WKMG Local 6 (Orlando) aired the second segment of an interview with a former Disney security officer regarding an incident in 2012 when the Disney Dream staff captain ordered her to “keep her mouth shut” after she investigated the sexual assault of an 11 year-old girl by a 33 year-old Disney waiter.
The incident occurred in U.S. waters in Port Canaveral but Officer Dawn Taplin was ordered by the staff captain to be quiet. She feared that she would lose her job if she notified the local police at the port or in Brevard county or called the FBI. She quit her job, according to WKMG, a few weeks after the crime.
Disney sailed the Dream out of U.S. waters and flew its employee home to India rather than promptly reporting the sexual molestation to U.S. law authorities who had jurisdiction.
I should probably point out that the girl and get family were Brazilians, not Americans. It might be relevant to the story…
Yes. Which is the point.
And who will clean the toilets and empty the garbage cans. Nobody ever accounts for that in their utopian dystopian libertarian oligarchic fantasy world.
(The sex work, of course, will be taken care of by trafficked third world women, same as it is everywhere.)
And yet, the proposed model never seems to involve paying the “grunt workers” 10x as much as those who are “doing what they love.” Funny, that.
Now I’m imagining a cafeteria stocked with hamburgers made from spherical, frictionless cows.
Somebody put the windows in the wrong place by 45°.
Holy shit.
Thanks for the scary heads-up.
As I was just saying in another thread, fuck Godwin.
And here are the neoblackshirts.
I first heard about the neo-reactionaries from a Charles Stross blog post several months ago (that and trotskyist libertarian capitalists). I was unsurprised by the news, a lot of the ‘libertarian’ capitalists I had come across on the internet seem to have a disturbingly socially authoritarian attitude, and are dismissive towards any possibility of there being any non-goverment authoritarianism.
It may not be fascism, but it is just as bad.
