Patri Friedman on the Competitive Governance Universe
Whether we end up with one country or one thousand may be the most important political question that almost no one is discussing.
Picture Planet Earth in 100 years. We might imagine two possible futures:
In the first, there is just one government, the Global United Nations (GUN), which controls and tightly manages a shrinking population to ensure “sustainability” amid dwindling natural resources.
In the second scenario, there are a thousand smaller autonomous political units, ranging in size from a few dozen people to tens of millions. In some cases, the citizens of a particular jurisdiction do not even share a particular piece of territory, but rather have devised a patchwork of contractual agreements with multiple governing entities. Legal services are provided via the Blockchain with trusted technologies and third parties to verify transactions, and tens of billions of people peacefully coexist. In this scenario, the governing entities that enable people to utilize scarce resources most productively grow and expand, while inefficient governments lose their citizens and quickly go under. This way of looking at the world has been described by its proponents as “competitive governance” – a world where governments compete for citizens, and that competition breeds excellent service.
Whether we end up with one country or one thousand may be the most important political question that almost no one is discussing.
Although the Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Romer helped to popularize the relatively modest idea of “charter cities,” the more radical idea of startup cities – or even startup countries – is the domain of a still small group of Silicon Valley visionaries, investors, and entrepreneurs. But the ideas are picking up steam.
At the center of the competitive governance movement is Patri Friedman –the co-founder and Director of the Seasteading Institute, who more recently founded Pronomos Capital, a venture capital firm devoted to transforming the “governance industry” by promoting the idea of startup countries.
Patri was one of my first guests when I started broadcasting in 2009. Much has changed since he first launched the Seasteading Institute, and I invited Patri to share what he’s been up to and how the landscape (seascape?) has changed in the last 13 years.
Seasteading and related land-based projects represent the next frontier for radical libertarianism, following in the footsteps of Patri’s father – the anarcho-capitalist thinker David Friedman – and his grandfather, the late Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman showed how free trade areas like Hong Kong could supercharge growth and lead millions out of poverty. Patri’s ambition is to revive the fading legacy of Hong Kong, enabling the establishment of a thousand new nations – floating or otherwise – to pull humanity into the more optimistic scenario for the future. However, as we will discuss, these new governing entities need not adopt libertarian principles to still advance the broader libertarian agenda of enhancing freedom and competition at the level of choosing one’s jurisdiction. What freedom could be more important?
Tune in to find out the latest happenings in the universe of competitive governance, this Sunday on the show of ideas, or subscribe to hear the podcast.
ICYMI… Jonathan Hofer’s Harrowing Story of ALPR Failure
When I invited The Independent Institute’s Jonathan Hofer on the show to discuss his technical report on Automated License Plate Readers and the threat they pose to civil liberties, I had no idea that he was speaking out of personal experience:
You can listen to the full interview here:
The California Corner
Professor Richard Epstein has a harsh criticism of Governor Newsom’s endorsement for an increase minimum wage in the fast food industry (California’s Fast-Food Fumble, Sept. 13, 2022 - Defining Ideas).
Epstein notes that a ballot initiative is generally the only way to overturn such a law, given that the Supreme Court set a precedent during the New Deal that grants state legislatures wide authority to set policies around wage and hour restrictions.
However, the professor notes that there may be a viable legal challenge under the equal protection clause, because of the way that the law is written to apply only to one particular industry – fast food franchises. He writes:
“Any legal challenge from franchisors and franchisees is likely to receive a stony reception from a Biden-dominated National Labor Relations Board. So it is best to mount a frontal constitutional challenge in federal court, insisting that this statute’s multiple overreaches should condemn it to an early judicial execution.”
With the current Supreme Court makeup, it should be a slam dunk case.
“He who teaches, learns.”
Listeners to my show know that I am fond of citing Frédéric Bastiat’s framework of the “seen vs. the unseen.” In fact, I’ve probably mentioned Bastiat more than any other thinker over the years.
Many in the libertarian movement take their inspiration from Bastiat’s prolific pen. Dan Sanchez, writing on FEE.org, reports that the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education himself – Leonard Read – tried to emulate Bastiat, and called for “several thousand creative thinkers, writers, talkers—like Frédéric Bastiat was to the freedom philosophy” as the asset the philosophy needs the most (How to Create Like a Bastiat, FEE.org, September 22, 2022).
Sanchez cites both Read and Henry Hazlitt as two of the most prominent and successful followers in Bastiat’s footsteps, with books like I, Pencil and Economics in One Lesson reaching millions of readers.
Sanchez lays out the habits of thought that Bastiat, Hazlitt, and Read credited for their writing success. These habits include capturing ideas – even small ideas – by writing them down, and using writing as an exercise to improve one’s own thinking. Finally, both Hazlitt and Read suggested sharing one’s understanding as a way to better understand the material oneself. Sanchez quotes a book that Hazlitt wrote at the age of 21, in which he said:
“I primarily wanted to teach myself how to think more efficiently, independently, and, if possible, originally. I had already sensed that ‘he who teaches, learns.’”
