A Three-Hour Tour

[filkertom]

Every now and again, I mention my ultimate Lottery dream: buying an island somewhere, building up some infrastructure, and moving my family and a whole bunch -- three to five hundred -- of my friends there with me. Just getting us the hell away from everything.

It would never work, of course. There are too many technical problems, potential legal difficulties, and supply problems to overcome. Not to mention the existence of pirates, various naval forces with weapons tests, and the occasional tsunami.

Besides, Cthulhu's alarm clock might be about to go off.

This does not mean that I'm the only person to think like this. And now some ultra-rich doof is trying it. They're supposed to be little libertarian petri dishes, where a man can truly be free.

Good luck with that.

I figure that, in a few years, these little Time-Share 2020s will have been picked clean and abandoned, and maybe then we can go out there and rehab 'em.

Meantime, I'm saving up toward a missile silo.

What's your ultimate personal fortress? How detached from civilization do you wish to be? In my case, not much at all, thank you -- but I do want a nice, tornado-and-nuke-proof haven. (Seanan, don't you even think about all the ways you could mess me up with virii. I don't get enough sleep as it is.)

Comments

[holzman.livejournal.com]

I encourage these folks to build their Libertarian paradise, and I encourage all Libertarians to waste no time getting on over there and testing their theories out.

Whatever they choose to name it, we'll all call it by its traditional name: Coventry.

I do wonder, though:

• Who's going to clean the toilets? No one's going to get on an airplane to take bottom-rung jobs -- or even middle rung jobs -- if there's no such thing as a minimum wage, and there will be no native people to colonize into doing it.
  
• What makes them think a government in a position to spend trillions to their millions won't colonize them the moment they have something worth taking?
  

[oceansedge.livejournal.com]

well, ya know pollution .. eco conciousness .. it's all made up theories and lies by the gubbermint to keep us all in line. In liberatarian heaven we'll just dump our garbage and toilets into the ocean! Then no one has to clean it up.

[arakasi1.livejournal.com]

Well, they are, of course, going to have to bring in maids and janitors - probably from some part of the world where $1/day is considered a good salary. Of course, it just wouldn't do to have these people vote, or have any authority whatsoever, since they would just misuse the power. Actual citizenship would be restricted to the right sort - those who can pay the citizenship fee (let's say $1 million, as a nice round number) And BANG -we have our social mobility - any house maid can buy her way into citizenship if she can just manage to prove her worth by earning an extra $1 mil. Of course, you would have to restrict who can leave - it would be utter chaos if your entire garden staff could just walk away from their contracts and hop a ship heading home.

As for defense - well with no silly laws regarding private ownership of weapns, there is nothing to prevent a couple of billionares from clubbing together to buy a decommissioned Russian destroyer or two. Of course, they would also have to pay for mercenaries to man them (query - if you have half a dozen paymasters responsible for staffing a single ship, would the first officer report first to the captain, or the guy who is paying her?), which would add heavily armed marines to the semi-permanent underclass.

And, of course, anyone successful enough to become a citizen would have enough foresight to voluntarily contribute enough for maintainence (if it were mandatory, it would be a tax, and we can't have that, but die-hard libertarians would, of course, see that they need to pay for upkeep on parts of the island that they don't go)

Nothing could possibly go wrong.

Right?

Can we just save time and start calling it Jackson's Whole now?