Amusing...
China Miéville wrote:
It is one of countless recent dreams of a tax-free life on the ocean wave: advocates of "seasteading" are disproportionately adherents of "libertarianism," that peculiarly American philosophy of venal petty-bourgeois dissidence.
Claiming a lineage with post-Enlightenment classical liberalism, as well as in some cases with the resoundingly portentous blatherings of Ayn Rand, all of its variants are characterized, to differing degrees, by fervent, even cultish, faith in what is quaintly termed the "free" market, and extreme antipathy to that vaguely conceived bogeyman, "the state," with its regulatory and fiscal powers.
Above all, they recast their most banal avarice--the disinclination to pay tax--as a principled blow for political freedom.
The problem is the crippling of this tradition by free-market vulgarians.
Libertarianism, by contrast, is a theory of those who find it hard to avoid their taxes, who are too small, incompetent or insufficiently connected to win Iraq-reconstruction contracts, or otherwise chow at the state trough. In its maundering about a mythical ideal-type capitalism, libertarianism betrays its fear of actually existing capitalism, at which it cannot quite succeed. It is a philosophy of capitalist inadequacy.
But libertarians are political dissidents only in narrowly selfish directions.
For some libertarians, "liberty" is more negotiable than "aryan."
It is a small schadenfreude to know that these dreams will never come true. There are dangerous enemies, and then there are jokes of history. The libertarian seasteaders are a joke. The pitiful, incoherent and cowardly utopia they pine for is a spoilt child's autarky, an imperialism of outsourcing, a very petty fascism played as maritime farce: Pinochet of Penzance.
Hmm... it appears that someone woke up on the wrong side of the revolution. Poor baby. Miéville's gross misrepresentations of libertarianism are beyond ludicrous, so I won't waste time offering a point-by-point rebuttal. Speaking of schadenfreude, I must admit that I'm somewhat flattered by Miéville's diatribe. If the Marxists are that afraid of us, we must be doing something right.
