Part of a letter that I wrote: There have been many attempts by libertarians to start a new country, none of which suffered from the lack of funding. You have mentioned Liberland on the Danube river, which recently attracted the billionaire Justin Sun to be its Prime Minister. But, even more recent is Olivier Janssens, who is buying a piece of land in Nevis island and paying off $100 / month to every existing resident to keep the public in his favor. If we go back to 1970s, there was the Republic of Minerva: a man-made island in international waters made by Michael Oliver. This Michael Oliver didn’t put an effort to defend the island, and it was taken over by commandos from Tonga. Tonga claimed that the island belongs to it.
The pattern of thinking of defense last, not first, has been inherent with all libertarian attempts. This happens because of the libertarian Non-Aggression Principle (NAP) which is ill defined, and often gets interpreted as pacifism.
I am not a libertarian, and my approach to this problem is grounded in Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. I think the issue of defense is the primary one. Who will provide the initial defense for a new country? Simply hiring a third party military force is going to be expensive, billions of dollars. Therefore, I think a protectorate is a better model, because then the military is provided for free by the suzerain state. On the other hand, this forces full dependendence on the suzerain state, which means that the new country has no hope for real autonomy. There would be no real independence to have a laissez-faire capitalism system with a statist parent.
Therefore, I argue that there must be a dual protectorate of opposing parties. It must be done in a perennially contested region, which can announce independence as a solution for its geopolitical problem. Examples are Cyprus Buffer Zone (Greece vs. Turkey), Crimea (Ukraine vs. Russia), and the Sinai desert (Israel vs. Egypt).
As evidence for my theory, I give an example of the formation of Israel in Palestine. A new country appeared in the most contested and unlikely region of the world. Theodore Herzl tried to get the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to allow Jews to settle Palestine, as in the case of a chartered territory, but the Sultan did not agree. However, when Britain won the territory in WWI, there were the French and the Arabs allies that vied for the control of Palestine. The Balfour declaration and the British Mandate granted by the League of Nations, were the result of these conflicting interests for that region.
Part of a letter I wrote to Garry Kasparov, addressed as a cold email to the email address published on his website: My name is Boris Reitman, I’m the founder of the Anthemism initiative. Anthemism is the abandonment of efforts to reform statist countries in favor of founding a sovereign laissez-faire capitalist state consistent with Objectivism. The name is based on Ayn Rand’s novella “Anthem” in which the hero fails to reform his society, and starts a new one.
As applied to Russia, I think that the aftermath of post-Putin’s Russia offers an opportunity of reimagining the country, an opportunity that in normal times does not exist, and which is akin to creating a new country. Also, if some regions that are currently Russia will become independent, the same opportunity exists in those regions.
In fact, this opportunity is unique and may not repeat for centuries. The 19th century America came close to laissez-faire capitalism, but now it has descended into statism. And it happened so, because capitalism didn’t have the philosophical backing. Now, capitalism does have such backing (Ayn Rand), and there’s an opportunity to create the first free country in the history of the world.
In The Wall Street Journal obituary:
“Rand assigned Greenspan a nickname, “the Undertaker,” given his serious manner and because he always wore a dark suit and tie. Greenspan prided himself on his reasoning ability and thought he could beat anyone in an intellectual debate. Arguing with Rand “was like starting a game of chess thinking I was good, and suddenly finding myself in checkmate,” he wrote. “I was intellectually limited until I met her.” They remained friends until her death in 1982.”
“All of us are victims of the massive, ceaseless violations of our rights by government: the seizing of a huge portion of our earnings in taxation, the retarded rate of innovation due to a mind-boggling web of regulations, the sword over businesses’ heads posed by the antitrust laws, a government-imposed fiat currency that inflates away our savings.” — Harry Binswanger, Value for Value blog
That’s why it’s time, to exit our far-gone countries and start from scratch. That is what the hero of Ayn Rand’s “Anthem” did.