In A two-stage strategy for freedom I proposed that the best strategy to fight state power would be direct challenges on marginal constraints that would then grow into bigger and more organized challenges on more popular government powers until the government could no longer stand a challenge on its legal monopoly.
In the Impossibility of Limited Government and the Prospects for a Second American Revolution, professor Hans Hermann Hoppe proposes an alternative form of revolutionary marginalism. Instead of trying to marginally roll back government powers, either through electoral activism or the strategy of direct challenge, the revolutionaries should seek to seize total independence in very small, insignificant territories, in effect creating a micro-state. Each of these micro-secessions would pose an insignificant threat on the established states, particularly those undergoing comparatively severe crises threatening the legitimacy of established order. The strategy would then be a multiplication of these microstates, governed by full market-based constitutions, forcing the collapse of governments by a fashion similar to a death by thousands of paper cuts, or a microbial infection.
How would an enterprising revolutionary start this process? The first task is to ensure that whatever territory is going to secede be clear of any resistors to the secession. Those resistors would provide ample excuse for the local state to crush the secession. In order to successfully secede, the secessionists must own all the property in the area, and it is preferable that this property be of low value. This means that the first microstates would have to be created from empty land of no value.
The territory has to be marginally defensible as well as mostly insignificant. For example, when the secessionist naval artillery platform Sealand was approached by a Royal Navy ship it fired a warning shot. The British state, unwilling to create turmoil over such an insignificant problem, simply renounced any claim over it. New secessionists would have to invest in fortifications to the extent of the value of the land they are seceding with.
How would such a microstate survive economically? Hoppe cites as an example the port cities of Hong Kong and Monaco, whose land areas are occupied entirely with urban real estate. These cities are regional trading centers, providing low-constraint markets for much larger areas out of their jurisdiction. The latest such territory to experience a meteoric rise is the city-state of Dubai, which happens to have been built on utterly inhospitable desert and survives only as a trading hub. Any secessionist microstate would have to set itself up as a similar fashion, starting with simple trading enterprises that do not attract much attention (merchandise that is outlawed in the region, such as drugs and firearms, would have to be excluded).
As the microstates develop to become more important regional markets, their population density and economic growth rates will rise significantly. What were at first insignificant secessionist territories will suddenly become an important part of regional politics. There will be many calls to reassert the authority of the regional state on the area. To prevent this the secessionist state must entangle itself in the political structure of the regional state, through the conventional means of lobbying (aka bribery) of local politicians, or the unconventional means of supporting revolutionary activists practicing the first strategy outlined of direct challenges on political authority. This would preferably be done by businesses whose main interests are in the regional state, but who also happen to run critical operations in the unconstrained marketplace of the secessionist microstate. The best example of these would be large multinational insurance companies that insure private property in the microstate and provide arbitration and legal services.
In the latter stages of such a strategy the first microstates would become exceedingly dense urban areas surrounded by large, still government-dominated suburbs. The contrast between the two areas would resemble the face-off between West and East Berlin. As large masses of people would desire to live in the free zone, and the real estate of this zone would be extremely valuable, restrictive immigration policies would have to be practiced in order to forbid overcrowding. The merchants would desire to set up shop in a new free area by repeating the operation of land purchase and secession, an operation that they would now be sufficiently experienced in to succeed without much effort. As well the many free states of the world would be bound together by mutual insurance contracts, and their collective economic power would make them strong enough to bribe or defend against the world’s most powerful hegemonic states.
This process would in effect be the creation of a new Hanseatic League, an alliance of merchant cities that leverages its wealth to grow new cities in new territories, but which does not attempt to forcibly remove the established powers in these territories. With its immense wealth would come the power to indirectly support revolutions to abolish governments in weak or failed states, creating more markets for their insurers and arbitrators.
What kind of people can start this today? Maybe you are a man looking for adventure. Maybe you are looking to invest the considerable wealth you have earned in your long career into something that will benefit humanity. Maybe you are just looking for an honest living in a dishonest world. All of you need to find each other and organize yourself into a company, pool your assets and set up a trading port in one of the world’s increasingly numerous failed states. Good starting points would be the coasts of Haiti or West Africa, areas that all of the world’s great powers would love to see vanish forever. Grow your business from there.