7 Concrete Use Cases for Seasteading

• John Vandivier

Part of me fears actions based on abstract rather than concrete thinking. Seasteading has immense theoretical backing as an avenue for needed competitive governance, but where would the funding for a Seastead come from? Imho, the concern is not that there is a lack of funding from ideologically motivated libertarian types. Au contraire, I fear that such motivation will lead to a huge amount of funding without concrete use, leading to waste and monitoring problems.

The solution is to define a concrete use case. This post describes three concrete use cases for Seasteading. This is obviously not a comprehensive list, but a stab at initiating an iterative process of defining concrete use cases.

  1. Deregulated insurance.
    1. In the US we have heavy insurance regulations including sometimes covering preexisting conditions and other stuff. One main effect is inflated premiums. Deregulation would cause consumption from around the world, higher quality, lower prices, success on the permitting seastead.
  2. Deregulated lending and lending-as-insurance.
    1. Lending regulation prevents lots of creative finance opportunities which could save individuals lots of money. One example includes a home refinance which puts cash into the hand of the homeowner. This was at one time legal in the US but now it is not. It is legal in some other countries.
    2. Another example is lending-as-insurance. In the US your loan is subject to regulation based on the reason for lending. This is suboptimal. Consider that \"insurance for prexisting conditions,\" other than being an abuse of English, could be solved by a lending process. Loan pre-approval for medical conditions can act as insurance, and the same for auto insurance and so on. Allowing loans to be used this way would allow many individuals to conduct personal finance in a way that is effectively self-insuring because they can self insure against lifetime wealth rather than present wealth, leading to large surpluses in the form of saved premiums otherwise paid to insurance agencies.
  3. Allow discrimination including religious discrimination.
    1. Discrimination is a dirty word and it's outlawed in most of the developed world. However, if factors like age, race, religion, and so on have real correlations to real effects, and there is good reason to think they do, then allowing discrimination can in some cases be beneficial from a productivity standpoint.
    2. Reverse discrimination in the developed world exists anyway lol so stop trying to prevent people from doing their thing anyway. Give em some freedom and the losers will go broke that much quicker if you think discrimination is an economic bad.
    3. One way to do this would be to introduce heterogeneous citizenship prices.
  4. Deregulated investment and a deregulated stock market
    1. Stock market regulation prevents lots of otherwise useful funding
    2. Even recent pro-crowdfunding regulation is not free enough.
    3. Perhaps denominated in crypto but that need not be the case.
  5. Custom legal entity formation
    1. Different legal entities exist all over the world
    2. Integrating cross-country legal entities is sometimes difficult
    3. A seastead could allow a single entity to have multiple statuses which would allow the seastead to be a legal integration hub and this would be attractive to many individuals and for many contract purposes
  6. Removal of legal precedent as a valid grounds
    1. Judicial decisions could be more adaptive if they are not bound by precedent.
    2. Eg you can't overturn another court's decision just because of precedent. You need an independently good reason.
    3. This is not to render precedent meaningless; judges and judiciaries will bear largely continuous results even without precedent as a binding thing.
  7. The almighty head tax
    1. A uniform tax imposed on each person.
    2. Obviously good for economic reasons, seldom done anywhere.
    3. A seastead could implement this.
    4. Or other taxation schemes; flat tax, fair tax, no tax, yo tax. (I made the last one up because it rhymes.)