Crack-Up Capitalism

The book explores the minds of the libertarian movement that have tried to crack up the nation-states in the name of capitalism without democracy and without national / legal oversight. The book starts with an exploration of Uncle Miltie's fondness for pre-reunification Hong Kong as well as the case of Singapore. As an aside, the book shows three generations of Friedmans, all with the same unoriginal ideas. More generally then, the book is about zones, export processing zones, economic development zones, free trade zones, all these areas carved out of national territories, exempt from regulations, labor laws, and (heaven forbid) taxation. This is the dream of libertarians: to crack up the nation-states, and create thousands of zones, governed by libertarian principles. It's entirely coincidental (snark) that these libertarian thinkers almost always end up bedfellows with white supremacists (see the case of Ciskei as "voluntary segregation"). For them, racial separatism and segregation is ok as long as it "chosen" from the bottom up, rather than imposed. Out of this type of thinking also came the idea of seasteading, entities existing in international waters, therefore either not subject to any national laws, or choosing which ones to navigate to. In all the cases presented in the book, the common thread is a disdain for democracy and popular governance, and a solid dose of old-fashioned social darwinism, with the libertarians seeing themselves as superior beings, able to win against the Westphalian order, by sheer force of how much better the zones are, compared to messy democracy. In the end, all the different projects that have been tried, have largely been failures, but that never stops these self-proclaimed geniuses from moving on from one failure to the next, while claiming to go galt. And there is always seems to be deep-pocketed funders for these projects (the Koch brother are mentioned multiple times). The book is rich in examples of attempts at creating these libertarian paradises, from, again, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the docks of London, all the way to Dubai, Honduras, and, of course, the metaverse. In meatware or virtual reality, the wealthy can't wait to get away from the rest of us, and certainly away from any idea of the common good. And yet, as the book notes, "From Honduras to Dubai, the waged service class is the easiest for the visionaries to forget and the hardest for them to live without. (...) The cloud floats because the underclass holds it up." (222). Never mind the environmental toll of maintaining a "cloud country", funded through, of course, cryptocurrency. It is totally dystopian, of course, but there are some powerful backers behind this movement, like Peter Thiel. We should pay attention.