The difference between micronations living off of big nations and what we are aiming for is that the micro nations generally operate in the framework of the larger nations. As someone else said, Monaco pays its French taxes. If it didn’t, France would do something drastic (or else its businesses would all head for Monaco). Diplomacy with the state isn’t going to work because the state doesn’t need to negotiate to succeed, whereas you do. If, for example, you declare yourself independent and refuse to pay US taxes (assuming you are in the USA), the police will come and arrest you, they won’t send diplomats seeking negotiations because they know that they stand to gain nothing from that. At any rate, that doesn’t solve the problem of you still using state provided services without paying for them (primarily water). Admittedly they SHOULDN’T be run by the government, but the fact that the government runs such services means that they have all the excuse they need.
The last time something along these lines was tried, the Minerva project I believe, thugs from a nearby country came, claimed the land, and forced the Libertarians to leave without bothering to negotiate. The libertarians, might I add, didn’t bother defending themselves (something that probably could have been done, seeing as how the invasion was coming from bloody Tongo, not the US marines). The state will NOT allow people to just leave. If that was the case, we wouldn’t be here, would we? We would have long since seceded, the government would be of far less relevence, and this institute would be pointless. Also, somewhat on topic: I believe Mises once said that if a gang declares independence inside a country, it cannot truly be considered a new nation; if the government rejects its independence and crushes it, it didn’t exist long enough to be considered a nation; if the state tolerates it, it is existing by the force of a stronger government, not by its own might (we would, if we seceded in tiny groups or as individuals, be in the second category).
Seccession IS possible, but it requires a reasonably sizable portion of people in one area, as the FSP is trying to accomplish. That way, the state can’t simply squish it when they try to declare independence. Ideally, it would be in a place where a region CAN make good justifications in seceding (if the FSP succeeds and gets New Hampshire to secede, the US government would have a harder time ignoring it and destroying it than if a couple thousand people spread out across the US declared independence and waited for the cops to arrive, this being because one can make constitutional arguments stating that seccesion is okay).
Also, we can NEVER assume the state will simply negotiate. That is an incredibly naive view to take, and counter productive to boot; How can we justify an anarcho capitalist society’s superiority to a state if we must assume the state is willing to accept an ancap society on its borders without invasion? This is a HUGE issue that we can’t sweep under the carpet. If we don’t figure out what happens when a state decides to absorb an ancap area (“For its own good” or to prevent all the businesses from leaving), we are making the same mistake as Communists when they don’t ask “What if the socialist utopia arises with no government and some people want to work as wage slaves?”. Yet every time I ask this, I either get an answer I would expect from a damned Marxist on the subject of freedom of choice (“The state WON’T attack”) or I get a bunch of sophistry and word play (“Without a government, they cannot surrender”) (on that subject, it seems like we resort to word play and definitions far too often, something that isn’t good; whenever I see someone doing that, they seem like they are trying to weasel out of a serious concern).
However, seccession IS our best option (as we don’t have the numbers for democratic reform, violent revolution, etc).