The Seasteading Institute

I agree with Vince. I mean, I hate voting as a way to manage huge societies. The whole point of seasteading is to create an alternative. But that doesn’t mean that we can do away with voting entirely. Some decisions need to be made collectively. Voting methods are ways of taking individual preferences, and aggregating them to form group preferences. For anyone but a hermit, I think that is useful. Not how we want to run the important functions of society, but still useful.

There will never be a society which is unanimous in all things.

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Again, voting is a signaling method. The decision is already made on the individual level. I am not convinced that your way is better because more people voted that way. I merely make the decision that even though the decision was suboptimal in this case, the benefit I get from harmonious society is greater than the benefit of striking out on my own.

I couldn’t have said it better. These “vote with your feet” folks (presumably pretty strong libertarians) are talking about a different issue than I brought up. They are talking about choosing from a host of available societal rules, which were created by some group decision-making process (aka “election”) in the given society.

I’m talking about the method by which a society creates its rules in the first place. And a lot of people don’t realize how huge the decision of voting method is. You look at Bayesian regret figures, and score voting just creates a huge increase in average citizen happiness.

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Instead of any kind of voting, have an ongoing contest which allows each individual to choose their leaders, changing them at any time. I’d rather work with a current government — the Democratic Republic of Congo — and get some kind of autonomous or sovereign status for an isolated farming village in the jungle and do my experimenting there. It is really a global risk management plan for some humans to live on, beyond peak oil, virus pandemic or other catastrophe. emperorcontest.com

Voting is a particularly insidious surrogate for individual consent. It’s main use nowadays is to give the illusion of justice in situations where severe injustice is taking place. To be honest I’d rather live under a monarchy with safeguards for individual liberty and universal equality than under one of these fraudulant electoral dictatorships we have masquerading as Western “democracies.”

I like the idea that anyone in a country can rise to a position of leadership if they have the passion, vision, and skills necessary. The idea that only direct progeny of the current ruler are capable of ruling is a hopelessly outdated concept that has no scientific or logical basis.

I like the idea that nobody can rise up to a position where they have coersive power over me. This is why I would prefer a monarch with limited power than the electoral dictatorships that we have now. The problem we have with “Western democracies” is that we believe voting gives legitimacy to autrocities including invading foreign lands and imprisoning large portions of our population for victimiless crimes as is going on in America right now.

It’s a suble sociological thing, but monarchs are actually answerable to the population in ways that elected bureaucrates aren’t. For instance in Saudi Arabia the royal family is expected to carry out charitable acts for the poor including paying for medical expenses when they can’t afford it and housing. They could NEVER get away with invading a foreign country like our “leaders” have in America or even the so called “elected” Sadam Hussein did in Iraq. There’s a case were voting was clearly a propoganda stunt, but I would argue most supposedly “free” elections are not much better.

Also, take a look at the monarchies and elected for life presidencies around the world. You’ll find that they tend to have much lower and less invasive taxation than we have in America and Europe.

My point is that limited government, where individual and community rights are respected, is more important than voting.

monarch with limited power than the electoral dictatorships that we have now

I agree with your distaste for elected leaderships, but the whole “monarch” thing is what I don’t like. I am all for a single leader with limited power and “safeguards for individual liberty and universal equality”. I just don’t like inherited leadership. Succession should be based on merit…not on birth order.

Ditto, word for word.

- Nick