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I heard it was you Talkin' 'bout a world Where all is free It just couldn't be And only a fool would say that - Steely Dan

A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom. - Bob Dylan

Here's a ramble that's been hanging in my drafts for a while: Why do so many tech folks identify as libertarian? What do they mean? Is politics ripe for tech disruption? It's a brand new year, and all old posts must go!

When I say libertarian, what gets me going is the person who, whenever something is messed up, thinks "OMG, if the government would step out of the way, a market solution would appear and work so much better!" ... Even for activities which historically have a strong government role, roads, schools, money and banking, safety standards, pollution, etc.

If you think this sort of immaculate, spontaneous order is a straw man, oh boy, just go to a Gary Johnson event and hear him questioned about whether it's OK for the state to issue drivers licenses and speeding tickets. Not to mention debates about whether the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a worse infringement on liberty than Jim Crow and segregation, or it's moral for the government to tax people to save them from an asteroid impact, or whether parents should have the legal right to not feed kids and let them die. And those thought experiments aren't anomalies, the libertarian scene is a hotbed of non-seriousness to downright kookiness.

I like freedom as much or more than most. But the idea that freedom is, in and of itself, a sufficient condition for desirable outcomes for everything has never seemed a compelling, complete theory that can deal with public goods, coordination problems, financial stability, most of the things we consider economic policy. It just begs the question, it's the 'assume a can opener' of political ideologies. Once you give everyone freedom, you still have to design a market system and system of laws to solve social problems, define and assign property rights, decide what gets traded and how1.

Policies are market designs. Markets are sophisticated mechanisms, complex social institutions that have highly co-evolved with economic and political frameworks. There is no such thing as a pure free market, just as there's no such thing as a pure human 'state of nature'. Free markets depend on laws, cultural norms, technology which are like David Foster Wallace's water. They may seem natural and invisible because we've internalized them...but try explaining them to an alien or an uncontacted Amazon tribe. Laissez-faire is not even wrong, it's not even a thing. Free markets are games within a game, they are institutions humans create to serve objectives, they have to obey natural laws but they don't exist in a social and cultural vacuum, they are intensely developed to be fit for purpose.

And market designs involve values and choices. Freedom is not the only human value that matters. Policy involves difficult tradeoffs between freedom, some notion of effectiveness, and some notion of fairness. Here's a fancy graph!

That's my political science 'theory of everything'. (Inspired by Keynes) People organize to pursue their individual and group values2. They can choose to maximize different values. One universal value is freedom, or maximum power to the individual. Another universal value is fairness within the in-group according to some value system... each accorded status, power, material reward in accordance to their contribution and merit, with no one taking undue advantage of anyone else. Another value is 'efficiency', which is a catch-all for other possibly non-universal group values: economic efficiency and growth, national power and world supremacy, religious or sectarian values.

Extreme pursuit of individual freedom leads to libertarianism. Extreme pursuit of fairness leads to communism. Extreme pursuit of narrow group values at the expense of freedom and fairness leads to fascism.

Are tech types libertarian in that extreme sense of primarily maximizing freedom? Clearly not!

The vast majority of Silicon Valley political contributions go to Democrats. A tiny sliver of CEOs identifies as Republican, sometimes keeps it secret, or wears it as a badge of contrarianism. Someone like Travis Kalanick used Ayn Rand as an avatar, but loves Obamacare, which lets gig-ers get healthcare without putting the onus on their employer/platform.

The simplistic stereotype is that the tech elite are Randian technocrats who just want the government to get out of the way while they solve the big problems that confound the politicians, lobbyists, and bureaucrats, and make the world a better place.

But I think the proper analogy is that Silicon Valley techies view government as code, the operating system that defines the operation of society...an operating system maybe overdue for disruption and a major upgrade. And Silicon Valley types think they know code, know complex systems, and are just the ones to do it.

Let's explore the analogy between OS code and government a little. If you're not a coder type, skip ahead a bit.

Government defines rules between the people, corporations, the administrations, foreign policy. An operating system defines rules, protocols, APIs between the users, administrators, programs and processes, hardware, networking with other computers.

Government defines a market design that allocates public goods between competing interests. An operating system defines rules that allocate hardware (e.g. CPU time, peripherals) between different processes and users.

Like an operating system, you want government to have as small a footprint as possible, use as few resources as possible, and give users and developers maximum freedom to fully utilize all the computing resources at their disposal.

Like computers, economies have grown bigger, more powerful, and more complex. Both operating systems and governments have taken on greater roles over time. Add multiprocessing, now you need a good scheduler, memory protection. Add multi-user and networking, need much better permissioning and security.

As systems get better and more complex, users expect more and more from the OS in terms of services, coordinating and scheduling complex tasks, security, supporting complex peripherals. So, as the system gets better, the percentage of work done by the OS vs. individual programs tends to grow, and the resources it uses grow as well.

That's an essential paradox of operating systems and government. A better society is one where individuals are maximally empowered, and can also coordinate with others in complex ways. It's a hallmark of improving civilization to give more people access to a more complex network of interactions, because they are safe, they have good norms of behavior and trust each other, they have clear laws well enforced, they have access to basic services. The more complexity is supported, the better the society. More complexity and interaction tends to mean more complex laws and regulation, and more shared resources supported by government.

That government is best which governs least, but as society grows more complex, the bar will tend to rise.

In code, you want to abstract problems into modules that solve parts of a problem well. In politics you have the concept of subsidiarity: national, state, local governments; solve every problem at the lowest level of government that can effectively deal with it.3

The qualities that make good code are agreed upon...efficient use of resources, easy to use, simple to understand, easy to read and maintain. But code involves hard tradeoffs...fast, good, or cheap? Pick any two. What actually is good code is partly subjective. People get into religious wars about methodologies and languages...agile vs. extreme...functional vs. object-oriented, etc.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Government changes very slowly, tech changes very rapidly. So any optimization in government, i.e. writing really detailed regs applicable to the current state of technology and the economy, is generally a premature optimization. Therefore government is the root of all evil? Well anywhere there's something really wrong it's probably a government failure, by definition. But it's a catch-22, you don't optimize, government is bad; you optimize, and eventually you end up in an unplanned-for situation where the optimization makes things worse.

Checks and balances slow things down. They're sort of like bias and variance. You want to tune your system so that it adapts to change...but if it responds too quickly you can get instability and overfitting. You want your government to respond to the people and to changing circumstances, but not pivot abruptly on every whim. Direct democracy can be a double-edged sword. Brexit, Proposition 134.

Sometimes you need to patch code pretty quickly and you accumulate technical debt, expedient solutions which need to be more carefully implemented later, or create maintenance and other problems in the long run. Hard cases make bad law...the solution that seems just in a complex case doesn't always generalize. You don't want to optimize code too much for the current use case, you need to be flexible. And you need laws that reflect universal principles. Sometimes worse is better...a simple, cheap solution everyone understands is better than a highly optimized, over-engineered one.

The euro is the ultimate in political 'technical debt'. Build something that works today, even though it will need major re-engineering to be robust over the long term, and hope you can implement version 2 in time to avoid collapse.

As you add complexity, a well-designed system can iteratively get better and better. Up to a point. There comes a tipping point where it becomes impossible to maintain and iterate on. Sometimes you accumulate too much technical debt, or change is just too fast, and you need to start over from scratch. Security exploits, bugs multiply. The same may be true of society, the tree of liberty, etc.

Any computer system can get hacked. When you have a good market design, it's a good basis for powerful interaction and coordination. But all systems can be gamed and exploited. Unless people are mostly decent and bad actors are sanctioned, you can get moral hazard and a tragedy of the commons. We don't write systems or build hardware in which the components are told, here's what we want to do, you guys work out the protocols5. APIs and protocols are specified in gory detail using things like RFCs.

You can write awful systems in any language, and you can write pretty good systems in any language. It's the same with ideologies. There are countries with moderately socialist orientations that work pretty well, and there are socialist countries which are disasters. There are countries with mostly market-oriented solutions that work pretty well, and there are free-market countries of weak-state and strong-state varieties which are disasters.

Personally, I'll take Sweden over Pinochet's Chile. In my opinion there are no countries at the extremes of any axis that work well over a long period of time. Somalia, with no working government, is in some sense the apotheosis of small government and maximum private freedom, and not exactly paradise on earth.

Ideologies are like development methodologies, people get pretty worked up about them, you need some methodology, but any reasonable methodology that isn't applied so strictly it gets in the way is probably OK, and having decent developers is more important than which methodology they use.

If you're concerned about Obamacare trampling on liberties, and not about people unable to get care, being bankrupted, facing impossible choices and preventable deaths, you risk turning into an architecture astronaut caring more about buzzwords and ideological purity than actual solutions, outcomes, lives. The user wants code that works, and doesn't care about scrum or Ruby.

Ultimately, I think the Silicon Valley brand of libertarianism is really the cult of disruption; healthy skepticism of government as premature or partial optimization and technical debt; nerd suspicion of wooly MBA/JD pointy-headed boss types; desire to empower people with tools, knowledge, ability to make their own choices, build their own solutions; when that requires a strong guiding hand in the form of code, or government intervention (education, net neutrality), so be it.

When you translate the rules of society into code, is it always a win for the freedom and power of the individual? Not unless you're careful. Technology can be a sustaining technology for totalitarianism as well as a disruptor. It can be a tool for surveillance, social control, databases of Muslims.

I like Uber, but a lot of the code is a pricing black box designed to maximize the value of Uber, not a free auction market. There are still questions of fairness to e.g. the disabled, blacks. You can use big data to understand customers better and offer them more and better choices, or selectively charge people more.

Build a true 2-way market where drivers can offer services and riders can bid for them transparently, maybe even based on a blockchain ledger, and that's a true libertarian solution. If you work on free software, you are a true libertarian and a scholar and I salute you. Until then, you're paying lip service to freedom while creating a new layer of code to regulate behavior, while maximizing your own rent-seeking.

It can sometimes look like tech hubris, liberty for me, the nerd, and not for thee, the unwashed mashes.

Since we've expanded the scope to theories of everything, what really separates left and right? Some interrelation between interests, learned values, psychological makeup:

Decent people can solve problems using left and right solutions, just as programmers can solve problems with different languages. But there is good code and bad code. Indecent, extreme, and disagreeable people aren't going to solve anything.

We've become a nation of architecture astronauts, spending our energy on ideological flame wars instead of shipping code that works.

There's a fine line between being a critic and a contrarian, and being a hater tearing down the progress other people are trying to achieve. Once you get to the extreme of opposing all mandatory vaccinations, I would say you've left reason behind. Given what we understand about network effects, advocating freedom to engage in antisocial behavior without sanction seems like rejecting the categorical imperative and reason-based Western morality.

Elevating individual freedom to the highest and only moral good, and following that to its extreme conclusion on matters of asteroids and vaccinations, seems like bad code. In the extreme, it leads somewhere between indifference to the possibility bad choices may create human suffering and outright cruelty. Of course, gentle libertarian-oriented friends, I don't ascribe cruelty to you, but I urge you ask yourself how far extremism in the name of liberty should be taken before it becomes a vice, or at best self-defeating.

Men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters. -- Edmund Burke

To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. -- James Madison

1 Suppose individuals solve problems by freely agreeing on institutions like democratic governments with civil liberties and also taxes, police forces, prisons, some middle ground between non-violence and slavery? If people freely enter into a contract that imposes sanctions for violations, is it still freedom?

2 Yes, Virginia, people identify, and act with their tribe, nation, other institutions, not just as individuals. People have aspirations as individuals and also for their social unit. Have you ever been to a football game or other 'sacred' ritual where people dress, paint their face, eat and drink, sing, chant and play music in the proper manner to appease the universe and bring success to their in-group (and disaster to the out-group)? The original sin of communism and totalitarianism is not respecting the individual and private property; the original sin of libertarianism is not respecting the drive to identify and find meaning through an in-group, 'something bigger than me'.

3 If you think this is an easy problem, think again. Refactoring is a bitch. Some argue the 2nd Ave Subway costs more because it had to go deep below all existing infrastructure. If one entity owned all the buried infrastructure, you wouldn't dig up the road one week to fix electricity and the next to fix water, you would presumably do everything in one shot, or redesign an integrated subway/water/gas/electric/telecom package and have something more maintainable that saved money. But then every time you need an electric fix, you have to go through the monolithic infrastructure agency, maybe wait until you can schedule water/gas/electric simultaneously. Sometimes you need agencies that cross jurisdictions, like the Port Authority which coordinates transport activities that impact the NYC area with NY and NJ. Maybe guns are the poster boy for this problem. You can't regulate guns in Chicago if they are unregulated in Mike Pence's Indiana. So I would prefer a national registration system, with local authorities in charge of local regs, but then at least they would be able to look up what residents bought in another state, require training, insurance, follow the trail of guns used in crime.

4 Proposition 13, which freezes California property taxes at 1975 levels, achieves the unusual feat of being rash direct democracy (variance), and locking in an outdated policy over the long term (bias). Premature sub-optimization.

5 Actually, that's what machine learning is. But even in supervised learning, you define how the components can interact, and what they are trying to optimize and iteratively improve. Sci-Fi time! Imagine a society of the future where a giant computer is taught the human happiness 'loss function' and some kind of mother 'hello Google' and smartphone notifications directs everyone in the most optimal way.

6 Case in point: Civil rights. Was Jim Crow really more tolerable than the Civil Rights Act? Under normal circumstances a law targeting specific groups and specific outcomes, as opposed to universal principles, is bad code. But it's perverse to deny blacks the right to participate in democracy, enforce a system of segregation by extralegal means and unequal application of the law, and then say that system is less of a cruel insult to freedom than a law that ends it. When that system was maintained in many cases by unequal application of equal laws such as bogus 'literacy tests', I fail to see an alternative to mandating reasonable outcomes as a last resort in this sort of extreme situation. It's hard to do social science without thinking about outcomes; Noble principles and intentions should be eventually be checked against results. Ambrose Bierce said politics is a contest of interests, masquerading as a contest of principles. Better people acknowledge they are fighting for their interests, but also think of others and shared principles. The worst sort actually believe they are fighting on principle, and only their opponents are fighting for their own narrow interests. Whatever your ideology, at the end of the day you have to ship code that works.

The rest is here:
Is Silicon Valley Truly Libertarian? Is Politics Society's OS, Ripe For Disruption? - Huffington Post

Being Libertarian (satire) (blog)

Capitalism is a Broken System Being Libertarian (satire) (blog) Here is an odd confession from a libertarian (mostly) thinker. Capitalism is a broken and flawed system. It produces results of large disparities, and it creates inefficiencies in the economy. And, that is exactly why I love it so much. That is the ...

Originally posted here:
Capitalism is a Broken System - Being Libertarian (satire) (blog)

Nick Gillespie, Time, ReasonDonald Trump is nobody's idea of a libertarian but his presidency provides a tremendous opportunity to advance libertarian policies, outcomes, and aspirations in our politics and broader culture. Those of us who believe in reducing the size, scope, and spending of the federal government and expanding the autonomy, opportunities, and ability of people to live however they choose should welcome the Trump era. That's not because of the new president's agenda but because he enters office as the man who will inevitably close out a failing 20th-century model of governance.

Liberal, conservative, libertarian: We all understand that whatever the merits of the great political, economic, and cultural institutions of the last 70 yearsthe welfare state built on unsustainable entitlement spending; a military that spends more and more and succeeds less and less; the giant corporations (ATT, IBM, General Motors) that were "beyond" market forces until they weren't; rigid social conventions that sorted people into stultifying binaries (black and white, male and female, straight and mentally ill)these are everywhere in ruins or retreat.

The taxi caba paradigmatic blending of private enterprise and state power in a system that increasingly serves no one wellis replaced by ride-sharing services that are endlessly innovative, safer, and self-regulating. Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson's campaign sloganUber everythingwas the one self-evident truth uttered throughout the 2016 campaign. All aspects of our lives are being remade according to a new, inherently libertarian operating system that empowers individuals and groups to pursue whatever experiments in living they want. As one of us (Nick Gillespie) wrote with Matt Welch in The Declaration of Independents, the loosening of controls in our commercial, cultural, and personal lives has consistently enriched our world. The sharing economy, 3D printing and instantaneous global communication means businesses grow, flourish, adapt, and die in ways that perfectly fulfill Schumpeterian creative destruction. We live in a world where consuming art, music, video, text, and other forms of creative expression is its own form or production and allows us to connect in lateral rather than hierarchical ways. Pernicious racial and ethnic categories persist but they have been mostly supplanted by a tolerance and a level of lived pluralism that was unimaginable even 20 years ago, when less than of Americans approved of interracial marriages. Politics, Welch and Gillespie wrote, is a lagging indicator of where America is already heading and in many cases has already arrived.

Thus the White House Donald Trump enters and the government he heads is being dragged into the 21st century by forces against which he will ultimately be proven impotent. He famously wants to "make America great again," by which he means to return to the imagined world of his younger years, when the United States could dominate (or pretend to, anyway) the global economy, keep jobs from leaving, and successfully direct foreign affairs from the barrel of a tank or via international accords. That for his entire baby-boomer life the country was rarely "winning" on any of those scores is beside the point to Trump, even as it's important for the rest of us to realize that even as we were "losing" all wars (except the one that mattered most, the Cold War) and losing manufacturing jobs and gaining immigrants, our standards of living increased massively. What Donald Trump fundamentally doesn't understand is that our politics and culture aren't about winning and losing; they are about improving our options, opportunities, and possibilities.

Trump enters the White House with historically low approval ratings. This is not merely his fault by any stretch. His Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, was similarly distrusted, a reflection of broad loss of faith not in this or that candidate but the entire political system and especially the two major parties, Congress, and most parts of the federal government. Our declining faith and confidence in government are direct results of failures in government to deliver what it promises and, as a majority has long believed, a belief that it is trying to do too much. Trump is coming after not just eight years of an imperial presidency but 16 years of such behavior. For the entirety of the 21st century, the White House has been occupied by men who consistently arrogated more and more power to themselves, often only advancing their complex and self-serving legal arguments in secret or amongst their own advisers.

Trump's bullying personality, seemingly boundless egotism, and personal vindictiveness simply pour gasoline on the fire that is already lit. Serious conservatives and, at least temporarily, many conventional liberals have a heightened appreciation of limiting government power, especially in the executive branch. From secret kill lists to limitless surveillance to an endless list of presidential orders on everything from workplace rules to immigration, Obama "leaves a loaded gun in the Oval Office" for his successor.

The hysterical left, who dream of political concentration camps, and defense hawks, who conflate Putin's beggared Russia with the Soviet Union at its height of power and influence, see Trump as without any redeeming potential. They're wrong, at least from a libertarian angle. He is an iconoclast and has uttered many statements that suggest he may well be interested in smashing idols and the temples that house them. On some specific issuessuch as education, where he has fully supported the idea of school choice for K-12 studentshis thinking meshes easily with libertarian sensibilities about devolving more power and choice-making to individuals. He is bullish on lowering regulatory burdens pretty much across the board, which is a long overdue gesture that the last Republican president showed no interest in (George W. Bush authored a then-record number of major regulations). Despite his politically timed conversion to an anti-abortion position, he seems to indeed have the "New York values" that Ted Cruz pathetically tried to smear him with. As befits someone born and raised in the unparalleled mixing chamber of New York, he doesn't seem troubled in the least by gays, lesbians, and all forms of alternative lifestyles. On an individual level at least, he seems to connect with people from all walks of life and all parts of the globe.

In manyperhaps mostother instances, of course, Trump is as far from libertarian as possible. On trade and industrial policy, he is awful and his castigation of immigrants and Muslims as sub-human and unworthy of entry into America is morally repulsive. Such views are also at odds with the vast majority of Americans, two-thirds of whom believe illegals should be given a path not just to legal status but to citizenship (even 50 percent of Republicans agree with this).

But the hallmark of Trump's politics is not its populism but its general incoherence. His mind is a landfill of ideas, attitudes, and policies from the postwar era, some of which (such as economic protectionism) that were wildly popular and even somewhat effective (or at least not ruinous) for periods of time. But there is nothing in Trump's grab-bag of discrepant impulses that can or will speak to the future. That's because he doesn't live there, or even in the present. This is a 70-year-old man, after all, who not only dreams of "closing that Internet up in some way" but thinks that Bill Gates is the guy for the job. Throughout the campaign, he would trot out 80-year-old Carl Icahn, whose stock in trade was (often smartly) selling off company assets after hostile takeovers, as his model economic advisor. If nothing, Icahn's time has passed. Trump famously doesn't use email and even his robust, god-awful, and fully enjoyable Twitter account is stuck in a flame-war mode that was tired before Usenet groups stopped being a big deal.

Washington is broke, unpopular, and dysfunctional. The only important question is what will come next. Clearly, we need a government that spends less and does less but also appeals to most Americans of whatever ideological persuasion. We know what sort of operating system has improved our commercial, cultural, and personal lives: It's one that flows directly from libertarian ideas about maximizing options for individuals and the groups they form to discover and follow their bliss. This commercial-cultural-personal system provides basic frameworks and expectations that facilitate the creation of reputation and expectations of being treated with respect and reciprocity. It's built on persuasion not threats or coercion and allows people to turn away and leave if they want to. It neither requires pre-approval nor does it demand forced affirmation (simple tolerance will do). It calls for consensus as rarely as needed and only when absolutely necessary. When there were only three or four channels on TV, conflict over what was "acceptable" was likely inevitable. In a world of infinite choices that cannot be forced on anyone, discussions over what is good or bad take the form of conversation and not censorship. We have managed to create an operating system that is better than the one it replaced because it lets more and more of us launch whatever applications we want without crashing the whole computer or network. We can learn from each other and mash-up things we want to, however we want to. When we shop at Whole Foods or on Amazon, when we stream at Netflix, when we eat what we want and marry whomever we want, we're all libertarians, regardless of whether we voted for Jeff Sessions or Elizabeth Warren.

The trick, of course, is to translate that live-and-let live ethos, the cornucopia model into politics and government, which by definition precludes exit. Here, Trump's brashness and divisiveness is forcing all of us to realize government isn't and can't be all things to all people without endless conflict. We don't agree on enough to give the power the ability to dictate terms to all of us (and needless to say, such a system can't possibly be fiscally sustainable). In a genuinely powerful, if unintended way, Trump has put everything on the table, and it's that evaluation process we need to start now and move in an unapologetically libertarian direction. Our America has changed vastly since Social Security retirement was created and Medicare passed. The planet is not in a twilight struggle between the two principal political philosophies to emerge from the Enlightenment (liberalism and communism); global terrorism pales in comparison. We are as a planet vastly richer and more educated and more connected and empowered than ever before. More people live in more freedom and they want to get on with living their lives according to their own lights, not the dictates of this or that leader.

Because he is so unpopular, abrasive, and backward-looking, Trump is the end of the line, the last Plantagenet, not the first in a new line of kings. He will rule over not just the end of the Republican Party as we know it, but the end of the federal government as we know it.

Libertarians, our opportunity is now, with conservatives and Republicans fearing what they have wrought and liberals and Democrats terrified that the swollen state they supported may be directed against them. We have a way forward that will scale down the size, scope, and spending of government while transforming the social safety net into an instrument of support and opportunity. We have an increasing number of examples (the sharing economy, Bitcoin) that permissionless innovation provides the great leaps forward that governments promise but rarely deliver. We can replace fiscally unsustainable entitlements to rich old people with unrestricted cash grants to the poor, we can offer children a choice of schools rather than remanding them to minimum-security prisons based on their parents' ZIP codes. We can insist on taxes being recognized as the revenue necessary to run agreed-upon services provided by the government, not an endless scam designed to ratchet up deficit spending. We can demand to be treated as adults, capable of deciding our preferred intoxicants and medical treatments and speech codes. We need to lay all this out both in broad, inspiring strokes and detailed, serious policy plans.

By a two-to-one margin (60 percent to 30 percent), Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, a dread that was energized by the two main choices for president offered us in 2016and then double-underlined in a signature-gold Sharpie by the election of the man who becomes president today. A future in which government is disrupted and diminishedand individuals are empowered and enlivenedis possible, but only if we make it happen.

Here is the original post:
Donald Trump and the Libertarian Future - Reason (blog)

When Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal, helped launch the Seasteading Institute in 2008, it sounded like a libertarian pipe dream floating cities free from government meddling (no regulation, no taxes) that would be testing grounds for technological, social and political innovation.

But this past January 13, the dream came one step closer to reality when the Seastead Institute signed a deal with French Polynesia that lays the legal groundwork for the world's first semi-autonomous floating city-state.

French Polynesia is a cluster of more than 100 islands in the South Pacific, the biggest and best-known being Tahiti. Like other coastal and island nations in the Pacific, French Polynesia is courting investment in the so-called "blue economy," the sustainable development of offshore energy production, wild-catch fisheries, aquaculture and tourism.

The Polynesians are less interested in the seasteaders libertarian politics than their promise of delivering a high-tech floating village that will not only provide jobs for Polynesian workers, but attract investment dollars for Polynesian entrepreneurs.

RELATED: Giant Floating City Would Drift Like an Iceberg

Joe Quirk is the Seasteading Institute's staff "Seavangelist" and author of the forthcoming Seasteading: How Ocean Cities Will Change the World, written with Seasteading Institute co-founder Patri Friedman. Quirk was part of a 10-person team who visited French Polynesia back in September.

"This was a Polynesian-initiated project," Quirk told Seeker. "They reached out to us. It's an ideal country for seasteading, and they think we're the perfect industry for what they want to do with regard to the blue economy,"

The long-term vision of seasteading is to construct fully autonomous floating cities on the high seas where the "next generation of pioneers [can] peacefully test new ideas for government." But for this first, proof-of-concept project, the Seasteading Institute was searching for an island partner with protected shallow waters and an openness to new type of economic model called a SeaZone.

Another proposed model of a Seasteading floating city. Via Seasteading.com

For the past 40 years, countries across Asia and Latin America have established special economic zone (SEZs) with low corporate taxes and light regulation to lure foreign investment. The most famous SEZ is the Chinese city of Shenzhen, a sleepy fishing village which became China's first SEZ in 1980. Today it's a manufacturing and export hub of 10 million residents generating $230 billion in GDP.

SeaZones, as envisioned by the Seasteading Institute, do more than simply extend the SEZ concept offshore. Over the next year, the Seasteading Institute will be negotiating the legal terms of the SeaZone with the government of French Polynesia, which may include not only economic incentives, but a certain measure of political autonomy.

"Certainly the more [autonomy], the better," said Quirk, "But even if we just get something very modest, it could set a great example for what's possible. The exciting thing about French Polynesia is that it's as large as Western Europe, but only 1/1000th of it is land. They have lots of space to experiment with SeaZones."

The deal signed last week was just a memorandum of understanding between the Polynesian government and the Seasteading Institute. Before construction can begin on the hexagonal concrete platforms that would support the floating city, the Seasteading Institute and its Dutch engineering partner Blue21 must conduct economic and environmental impact studies.

RELATED: Asgardia: Probably Not Humanity's Protector

Quirk said that the novel floating platforms are not only environmentally friendly, but environmentally restorative. Rising water temperatures in the South Pacific have killed much of French Polynesia's coral reefs.

"Through the presence of small floating communities," said Quirk, "you could slightly lower the temperature of water in the immediate vicinity to spark the recovery of the corals."

Seasteading advocates envision a future where clusters of offshore communities serve as "green" foils to polluting coastal cities. The excess CO2 pumped out by cities can be captured by sprawling offshore algae farms and converted into biofuels. Nutrients leached away by wastewater can be used to fertilize floating vegetable farms and fisheries.

For now, though, it's all about building that first prototype and recruiting the first faithful seasteaders. If all goes smoothly with the Polynesian negotiations, Quirk said that construction could start as early as 2018 and the first units could be sold starting in 2019.

RELATED: A Simple Guide to Starting Your Own Country

According to conceptual designs, the artificial islands will consist of interconnected pentagonal platforms measuring 50 meters on each side. Each platform will be a mix of commercial, residential and green space. Real estate on the first islands won't come cheap. At an estimated $504 per square foot, it's similar to housing prices in Manhattan and London.

Despite the cost, Quirk says that more than 3,000 people have already completed a detailed online survey expressing interest in being the floating city's first residents.

"I don't think we're going to have any trouble finding people who want to live and open businesses on the first few islands," he said.

Billionaire Thiel is not currently involved in the Seasteading Institute or this first floating cities project in French Polynesia. When it became clear that libertarian islands on the open ocean would cost billions to build and secure, Thiel's initial passion for seasteading cooled.

But Quirk said the Seasteading Institute hasn't lost sight of its ultimate goal.

"The Seasteading Institute is interested in taking incremental steps toward more autonomy so people can experiment with new societies," said Quirk. "The technological innovation and legal innovation are advancing in parallel toward a long-term view of moving out to the high seas."

WATCH VIDEO: Cities Are Like Stars

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A Floating Libertarian City Gets a Step Closer to Reality - Seeker

In almost every aspect of our lives we experience change. Whether its our homes, where we live, what we do, or what we are interested in, we grow up and things evolve in accordance to our circumstances. However, some things cant change.

Our instinct, as creatures, forbids us to mold ourselves into things we cannot be, or do not want to be. Our conscience, if it pulls hard enough, keeps us on the right path.

There is also instinct that we follow, which is a part of being human. Some traits stand out stronger in different people, but there is one trait that all humans universally possess; its what built and destroyed civilizations, bringing entire societies crashing to the ground.

We want to be free!

From the times of nomads and cavemen all the way to the present day, humans have longed to be free. Whether it is freedom of thought, exploration, staying out past 11 PM, or just being able to cut a piece of pie without big brother looking in on you! Freedom, at least in some form, is what we all want.

So, it is no surprise that freedom has been an overarching factor in philosophy and politics for generations. It is what America was founded upon, and it is now considered a human right.

Classical liberalism (credited for being the basis of many democratic movements in the West) is the biggest building block in American politics; Indeed, its an even bigger factor than race or religion.

My point is that freedom will always be a massive part of the soul: therefore, political movements like libertarianism and anarchism will always have potential.

This is why I believe libertarianism has the tools to be a dominant movement in American politics if marketed right.

Marketing is everything. In politics, its the difference between being a US congressional representative, and being a 45-year-old full-time volunteer at the local county GOP headquarters.

If you allow yourself to be portrayed in a negative way you lose It is that simple.

If Democrats and Republicans have full power over the brush thats painting the portrait of you, be assured that they will market the painting as well.

Anonymous. http://www.imgflip.com

Heres why Gary Johnson, who was was once polling at roughly 13%, had it all squandered away: he failed at marketing himself properly.

Now, I cant exactly blame anyone, including poor Gary. The reason I cant blame anyone is because 2016 was a baby-step. Libertarians have never been in the spotlight to this degree before, and it showed.

Between What is Aleppo? and Garys apparent inability to name a single head of state, he was written off as a dumb has-been with particularly odd political positions. Gary Johnson is far from dumb, but that didnt exactly matter when election night hit.

The 2016 elections brought up a major roadblock libertarianism has struggled with for years: that is the image that the party is basically a bunch of pot smoking, shotgun owning, 25 year olds with Ron Paul 2012 bumper stickers on their trucks (which they are using to haul cement from Home Depot to build their backyard bunker).

That, mixed with Gary Johnsons gaffes, created a bad tasting recipe. That said, Libertarians made extreme gains in 2016, for that, Ill give him credit. Governor Johnson garnered more votes than any other Libertarian presidential candidate in history.

The hope is there, despite everything I mentioned. Libertarians still spoke to millions of Americans, and made history. Which further proves my point that people in general are attracted to freedom in some form, and in America, it happens to be in politics.

2016 wasnt your golden year, it was your training.

2020, or 2024 can be the presidential elections that end the two-party system If you can successfully transform yourselves, from a GOP-knock off, to a genuine movement, with separate ideas and clear positions.

Time doesnt heal all wounds, in fact, sometimes it makes things worse.

In marketing, and in public opinion, time is either your best friend or worst enemy. With Libertarians, its been both. Time has allowed the GOP-knockoff mentality to set in with many voters, while helping the movement grow to the size it is today.

Now is the perfect time to reshape the public conception of the movement. Funding, participation, and media attention are at an all-time high. A universal push, strong and with clear positions, is exactly what libertarianism needs. Yes, most libertarians have very Pro-Freedom views, but you cant build a political alliance on shrugging your shoulders and saying Yeah bruh, just do whatever. I dont care.

So how do we smash the image Republicans and Democrats have built? Well, Im a strong believer in looking back in time to find inspiration. And I know how libertarians love socialism so lets start there!

How do you rebrand a political ideology, when it comes to politics? Well, I would look into the recent revolution of, Vermont Senator, Bernie Sanders.

Socialism in the United States has long been a controversial subject. From Joseph Weydemeyer (a German colleague of Karl Marx) to Eugene V. Debs, socialism as an ideology has always been in the minority. It has also been politically persecuted in large part due to an extreme fear of communism.

Eugene V. Debs, a socialist activist, and presidential candidate for the Socialist Party, was arrested on charges of sedition, after criticizing President Woodrow Wilson on his war draft policies. Today, most of us would undoubtedly view this as a denial of freedom of speech.

In fact, at the time, many people believed the same way. President Harding even granted him a pardon after Wilson left office, believing (like many constitutional scholars at the time) that Debs was simply not that dangerous.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover dedicated much of his time hunting down communists. His famous night raids and undercover missions became infamously known. Add to this a massive wave of anti-socialistic sentiment in the United States (during the Cold War) and youd think youd have an ideology that was essentially dead.

On the contrary, Westernized forms of socialism survived the political purges of conservative governments in the 1980s and 1990s; not only that, but they grew. Many European countries, and Canada, have adopted limited socialistic policies or democratic socialism .

But signs of the movement in America were relatively grim. In fact, American presidents since LBJ havent been very progressive or socialist at all. Compared to our brothers across the Sea, we have actually been very moderate and Conservative. Even Obamas ACA reforms were still years behind what other nations had developed.

With all this going against Senator Sanders, what did he do? He was one careful old man for starters. When you watch his speeches on TV or listen to him, you wouldnt know it, but he had to be very careful not to come across as too extreme. Having the word Socialist in the title of your official political affiliation is bad enough but to actually sound like one? Not even Bernie could win races like that.

So how did he avoid the socialist trap? He marketed himself properly. Running as a Democrat was his first very smart decision. At face value, it made him look like a Democrat. Instead of the rhetoric filled ol revolutionary his critics portrayed him to be.

Second, he emphasized the more popular parts of his plans. Free healthcare, and free education etc.

Third, he always made sure people understood he was a democratic socialist, not a full blown socialist.

Last? He knew that if he got to the younger voters first, he could control a large part of the message. The new generation brings change, and the press is usually who communicates that change.

The media just loved it, and so did the people. He played where he could win, controlled the message, and successfully deflected attacks on his easily exposed flank, and it worked. Record numbers of Democrats came out to vote for him and he beat Hillary Clinton in the key Michigan and Wisconsin presidential primaries. However, as we all know, in the end it wasnt enough.

Bernie Sanders will probably never become President, but Libertarians need to study his strategies and figure out what they can learn by it.

Not every libertarian position is mainstream. Most of them, Id argue, are not. Our advantage comes in our philosophy, not individual policy questions. It may sound confusing, but its not as complicated as you think.

For instance, most Americans would agree that everyone has the right to do what they want on their property, as long as they arent hurting anyone else. Thats a basic libertarian philosophy. The problem? I highly doubt most people would agree to assisted suicide, drug use, and prostitution overnight just because its in line with libertarian philosophy. Thats where the conflict comes in, they like the idea of people minding their own business until they realize that means theyre going to have to do it too. The voters must ask themselves Do we want freedom that badly?.

Right there, thats the key, dont put them in the position to ask that question! Youre giving the extreme choice between either not joining the movement or joining it and becoming exactly the stereotype they have learned to hate.

A conservative can believe in low taxes, but that doesnt mean every Conservative thinks the income tax should be abolished.

When people look at American conservatism, they see many different levels. Moderates, grassroots, War Hawks, Evangelicals, etc.

We need to get to a point where we are seen in the same fashion. Not every libertarian believes in small government and low taxes. They may still prize freedom more than the average individual, just not to as extreme a level as other libertarians.

Part of the reason this is an issue is simply the fact that libertarianism isnt really big enough to show off your diversity as much. If you do not portray yourself as diverse and compatible with most peoples political beliefs, people wont think you are.

A libertarian will never become President if he walks out from his campaign headquarters and starts talking about how all drugs should be legal, all wars are unnecessary, and how all taxation is theft. All they will do is spark an angry-time wasting debate with some college students.

There is a reason why when extremists win, it surprises everyone. Because nobody expects people that closed minded and extreme to be taken seriously. We got that image because, well, its true. Extremists usually dont win, because people dont like loud rhetoric; they want someone who they can sit back and relax with while talking about real economic problems. Not a revolutionary burning his tax certificate in front of the federal reserve. Thats how a lot of people view the movement.

For all of my strong critiques of Gary Johnson, I supported him because I thought he was the right man for the job. What made it easier was that he wasnt as extreme as other libertarians. He made it clear he would work together with Democrats and Republicans and though he wasnt a moderate libertarian, he was in the same general area.

We must limit the grassroots rhetoric so it doesnt scare people away. Yes, I know, Keynesian economics suck and the freer the market, the freer the people. But, if we want to be taken seriously, we must broaden our approach. Remember, A moderate in a sea of extremists is a lifeguard for every intelligent individual, and believe me, people are smarter than you think.

Libertarians would do well to target three groups: the younger voting bloc; the business community; and progressive-moderate Republicans. These are the groups most likely to fully accept some form of libertarianism.

Younger voters tend to be more accepting and active. Like a race horse you try to mount it may be difficult to get on but once youve done it, itll take you wherever you want to go very quickly. A candidate with an energized younger base of voters not only supplies an endless amount of energy for his or her campaign, but also gives the impression of change, something people usually want.

Younger groups of voters, such as millennials, are more accepting of socialist leaning policies, however, I believe this to be a matter of exposure, not politics. I believe young people have accepted socialism or progressivism more than other generations because they have had the most positive exposure to it.

If young people were impressed with the same amount of positive influence for classical liberalism, I believe they could be the biggest base of support. Another added benefit is that younger generations are less likely to be put off by extremism. In fact, they are usually the ones who historically cause it. This means that the Libertarian Party grassroots are less likely to scare away potential voters in schools, colleges, and youth political organizations.

The business community is not usually satisfied. Even when given ample freedoms or low taxes, they are always pushing for more. Thats why they are businessmen, Its how they have survived.

Libertarianism, more than any other major political group, gives them that.

Targeting them would be an effective marketing strategy, especially now after 8 years of a progressive Democratic Presidency. One thing you need to make clear is libertarianism stands for capitalism, not corporatism or crony-capitalism: If you can pull that off, you not only gain a solid group of voters, but you create a clear alternative to modern corporatism -You get votes and make capitalism sexy again, Its the ultimate win-win.

Lastly, the underrated, underappreciated, and undermined wing of the Republican Party; the progressive Republicans.

Nobody in the Republican Party is more bullied, hated, and excluded than the modern wing of the party nicknamed RINOs (Republicans In Name Only). Its hard to believe the same fringe of the party that gave America Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower would be so abused and mocked; and abuse breeds dissatisfaction.

Progressive Republicans are most likely to be lured into voting Libertarian. The philosophy is different for the two groups classical liberalism and progressivism are two different things. However, both progressive Republicans and Libertarians end up agreeing on the same questions, even if for different reasons.

There are some differences, depending on how progressive the Republican is but, in general, both groups get along very well. 2016 gave Libertarians probably the best chance in history to steal Republican voters away from their party. Even the ones that werent technically progressive still voted for Gary Johnson in droves. The fear of Donald Trump gave Libertarians the biggest advantage they have ever had. 2020 will bring about a Trump reelection that will most likely give the same opportunity.

Now is the time to strike. The new sweep of populist conservatism will not only drive progressive Republicans, but also constitutional and even some grassroots Republicans, to your party.

The next party platform and nominee needs to be a part of an overarching strategy to appeal to these groups on all levels. If you cant, you wont gain the base of support needed to rise out of the less than 10% cage the party is currently in.

If you can successfully do all, or even any, of the things I mentioned, I am fully confident libertarians will make significant strides to winning a presidential election. Libertarianism isnt a small insurgent group of young rebels anymore. The party is over 40 years old with a good track record and a growing fan base.

You have the springboard, but so far you havent made the leap, or perhaps havent had the will or strength. Im sure that many of my fellow classical liberals will disagree with my analysis, but I assure you, all my research and thinking has convinced me that this is the path that needs to be taken.

Personally, Im not a libertarian. Im a left-leaning classical liberal. But I admire the Libertarian Party and I agree with them more than I do with the modern forms of the Democratic and Republican parties. My point of disagreement comes in the form of economics where I prefer a more progressive stance in the market place. But I agree with you far more than I disagree. I have never supported a candidate in a presidential election that wasnt a libertarian, for the simple reason that Ive never found a candidate, in my opinion, who made more sense than your own.

You have the power and the tools to break the two-party system, and that is a goal I think many on both sides can work to achieve. Your unceasing fight for privacy, freedom, and peace has brought so many so close to voting for you, only to have the false image of a libertarian extremist scare them away.

I dont want that; this party is better than that, and so is the movement.

In closing, you have a meeting with destiny. You understand that a nation, given every freedom deemed acceptable by the world but with no power to protect it, never actually had it in the first place. You understand why it is important to keep the freedom to choose over the opportunity to gain. And you have a remarkable, if somewhat insistent, habit of reminding us what happens when we lose those rights.

All these things are [a few of] the reasons we need the Libertarian Party and why you, not only deserve success, but will excel at it. Do not ever give up the very basis of your party, but always make sure that everything else is flexible. If we are not willing to sideline our non-essential opinions, how can we expect others to accept our most basic beliefs? We can sit around in our perfect worlds demanding that everyone totally convert to what we think or want, but it is not all practical nor will it succeed without resorting to violence.

Thats how life, and consequently politics, works. Libertarians are not immune to this, and you need to understand this to truly succeed.

* Caleb Mills is a politically active teen who believes in individualism, classical liberalism, and globalism. Mills is currently writing for http://www.atlasnews.co/ and has also worked as a consultant on US history and politics for other publications.

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Selling Libertarianism: What You're Doing Wrong - Being Libertarian (satire) (blog)