Historically, the emergence of new frontiers has frequently been accompanied by spates of violence as rivals rush to assert, and defend, new claims. As new frontiers open up in the oceans, the arctic, and in space, does an orderly way exist to peacefully divvy up the rival claims for territory that will surely arise? Given the immense destructive power of modern nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, the absence of clear international cyberwarfare norms, and the existential threat posed by a hastily conducted AI arms race, a working solution to this issue has never been more urgent.
Bidding is the obvious peaceful alternative to fighting over the use of scarce resources. When two people bid to against each other to access the labour of other humans, the money should clearly be paid to the person who supplies that labour. Similarly, if a craftsman creates an item of value and puts it up for sale, the proceeds of any auction between rival bidders for that item should go to the manufacturer of that item.
But what if no one created the value that competing interests bid to use? What if it has no rightful owner? There’s only one just answer: if no one created an item of value, then everyone has an equal claim to it.
There would, of course, be no sense for everyone to equally use everything – including things they didn’t want. For the sake of productivity it is far better for the winning bidder, the party with the greatest desire and ability to make use of the resource in question, to have sole access to that resource.
The great insight that Henry George articulated, in his masterpiece Progress and Poverty , was that the inherent equal entitlement of everyone to all natural value could be resolved with the rationale for giving sole access to the winning bidder, with a simple Land Value Tax whose proceeds would be redistributed equally throughout the population.
Henry George’s ideas are the basis of Geo-Libertarianism.
The three basic Geolibertarian principles are:
- Everyone is entitled to freely help themselves to all abundant natural – and relinquished – resources (i.e. abundant meaning supply exceeds demand at zero price)
- Everyone is entitled to an equal share of all scarce natural and relinquished resources
- Everyone is entitled to the full benefit they negotiate for the value of their labour – this includes any increase of value that their labour has added to capital they have negotiated legitimate ownership over ( labour includes effectively managing a company you own ).
Once you grasp that relinquished resources have the same status as natural resources, just as dumpster divers are free to help themselves to trash produced by labour, most concerns about quantifying the labour mixed with land, disappear. Land with negligible value, whether natural or relinquished, is available to all for a negligible land value tax. The value of improvements, that labour produces, is simply the minimum cost of producing those improvements on abundantly available land (assuming workers on normal salaries produced them). This applies as equally to a house, a factory or a shop as it does to a golf course, a ski slope, a hedge row or any other kind of cultivated land. The land value tax is the yearly payment the state must charge to reduce the sale price of the land to the cost of producing the improvements on it – or a sum high enough to cause some owners of unimproved land to freely give it away, but low enough to ensure there are always takers.
Accusations that libertarians would leave homeless single mothers in the cold to starve are therefore unwarranted as a basic income, paid to rich and poor alike, is consistent with zero income tax. Indeed supporters of land value tax include notable libertarians like Milton Friedman and Peter Thiel.
Seasteading And Geolibertarianism
The most credible and motivatated movement seeking to expand into a new frontier is the seasteading movement. The Seasteading Institute eventually aims to establish new floating nations in international waters. The institute has met with representatives of states as well as engineering firms which build floating structures, such as Blue21 .
In the past, territory was fought over. Since 1945, sovereign territories have mostly, either remained static, or fragmented. The UN consensus seems to be that since war is bad, and since sovereign boundaries are mainly altered through war, the less we try to alter borders, the better. Independence movements have, from time to time, caused sub-regions of countries to establish themselves as independent nations, but very few nations have expanded their borders since World War 2 (with the exception of German reunification). Instead, the general trend has been increasing regional independence and more numerous, smaller, independent nations.
Yet this pattern of establishing new nations through civil war, civil unrest or political activism in unruly regions of existing nations (Czech Republic, Slovenia, Estonia, Bangladesh, Eritrea, etc.,) offers no guide for dealing with new unclaimed frontiers – especially international waters. As the ocean becomes increasingly valuable due to improvements in underwater mining technology for fossil fuels , and other minerals , as well as open ocean fish farming , OTEC and off-shore wind , the question of how to divvy up oceanic resources is becoming urgent. We already see disputes over ocean territories developing between nations while existing international conventions for determining sovereign maritime control are hideously tangled and arbitrary.
Seasteads, could test out new ways to achieve a peaceful territorial consensus. Systems which, after ironing out the bugs, could resolve territorial disputes everywhere.
I propose applying geolibertarian principles to new territorial claims in international waters. International waters is particularly suitable for geolibertarianism as it contains little, if any, fixed capital. This reduces the complication of separating land from improvements.
Geolibertarian principles suggest the following approach for establishing sovereignty in international waters:
- A new seastead informs the UN of its intention to ringfence a patch of oceanic territory
- The UN announces this intention to all existing nations of the world (including other seasteads) and makes a record of this declaration publicly available to anyone – including other groups who may want to establish their own nation.
- If no one challenges the territorial claim of the seastead, they get it for free
- If some party disputes all or part of this claim, the UN conducts an auction where disputing parties bid against each other for control of the territory. Procedures to parcel the disputed territory into different “lots” will have to be worked out by trial and error. Control of each lot goes to the seastead that bid the highest.
- The parties bid over yearly payments. These payments must be made to the UN in perpetuity unless control of the territory is voluntarily relinquished.
- No territorial claim to international waters is permanent. It will always be open to challenge. Another seastead, or new entrant, can always challenge an existing seastead’s territory to a bidding contest. If a portion of their claim is challenged, and they are out bid, they must part with that portion of territory. This prevents first movers buying up vast tracts of international waters early on, closing up the frontier, and blocking new entrants. Existing seasteads may have to increase their yearly payments to the UN to defend their claims against new challengers who offer higher bids.
- Yearly payments to the UN should mostly be redistributed as a per capita payment to all permanent residents of international waters (regardless of their jurisdiction of residency – if any). A small portion of the proceeds should fund the program’s running costs.
Bugs and details will, of course, need to be ironed out. Perhaps bidding rules should not allow challengers to bid for a seastead’s maritime heartland before bidding for its borderland. Other issues may also crop up and trial and error will establish norms for good conduct.
This system for resolving disputes should first be beta-tested on tiny disputing seasteads competing over different portions of international waters before a smoothed out, re-purposed version is used to resolve disputes between large nations over exclusive economic zones.
A further benefit is that, by creating an economic incentive to live at sea, a maritime basic income could encourage floating settlements to be built near maritime workers – who mine minerals, manage wind turbines, maintain OTEC systems or run fish farms. This would let their families live nearby and improve their quality of life.
Similar bidding systems run by the UN along geolibertarian lines have also been proposed as a means of preventing space wars between rival asteroid mining companies.
Future Territory Disputes Could Save, Rather Than Destroy, Lives
Needless to say, the effect of applying this system to existing terrestrial sovereign borders would, in most cases, be destabilizing to say the least. The safest way to establish the sovereign borders of land governments is to stick with the status quo – if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
Nevertheless, ribbons of disputed territory at the borders of some sovereign nations are already potential flashpoints for future wars, the Golan Heights being one example. A geolibertarian solution (debugged by seasteads) where disputing nations make rival bids of yearly payments to the UN for control of a disputed territory, would be unlikely to worsen these tense situations and may improve them.
The resulting yearly payments to the UN could fund a global universal basic income, which everyone – including inhabitants of the poorest countries – would receive. Arms races already are a kind of bidding contest between combatants, yet the result of this “bidding” is wasteful and destructive, resulting in the trashing of expensive military hardware and human life.
If, instead of trying to out-spend rivals in weaponry, competing countries tried to outspent each other with charity, then, in the future, territorial disputes between nations could save, rather than kill, people.
John
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