It’s a good plan for regular people, I guess. I’m just one of those who is unwilling to wait. And also, I don’t think fighting the system from within is likely to do any good, even going to jail and all that. You may end up hurting your cause more than helping it.
There are people who have literally dedicated their entire lives to just one small cause, to something like fixing schools, from within the system, or by trying to collect power within the system and do it that way, ie: the Ron Paul approach. If you work in the system, you will face the choice of power or principle, and you will probably choose power, because your goal is to change things.
We’ve seen lately Paul Ryan soften his various positions to accept a power position. He will probably hate himself in a few or many years time for abrogating principle and being powerless to do anything about a lot of stuff–not that he was even very libertarian to begin with and he’s still softening principle!
Maybe with a few more decades of people doing stuff like that, some minor change and momentum might arrive. Probably not until some disasters have already hit us as a result of current policy. We’ve got a fiscal time-bomb in this nation waiting to pop, with insane borrowing levels and socialized healthcare dropping, and libertarians probably won’t have enough power and numbers to run with the ball after the fumble.
Crises creates political will, which means crises move statism forward–not backward. All the libertarians hoping for the system to crash have got it backwards. The crashed system only means the statist program advances. Even if the US went down as a political entity, we could not raise up a libertarian standard in its wake, and what happens if we win the war in the US but lose it in the UN, what if a global nation state rises up and claims jurisdiction over the entire planet, as the statists already want to create.
Then we’re screwed.
Even a complete meltdown of the dollar wouldn’t automatically mean the failure of political institutions in the US, and likely wouldn’t result in a libertarian upswing philosophically. Because libertarians tend to overlook the power of the intellectual elites (college professors and teachers) and opinion shapers (news) to shape reactions to events and desired outcomes among the populace.
Until the intellectual elites become libertarians, change is not possible within the US. Now ask yourself how likely it is the intellectual elites will ever become libertarians.
Hell will freeze over first.
I’m going to describe this strategy, give it the name 'Conversion’.
The Conversion strategy claims that the best avenue for change is to convert an existing nation state via influence within. However, it’s been nearly 50 years since the resurrection of the libertarian doctrine, and our patron saint, Rothbard, has already produced clear and intellectually pure statements of libertarian theory, meaning that what was so long lacking, good theory, we now have. That’s what the entire past was missing. We have it. We should be pinching ourselves for joy.
I prefer the Western strategy, meaning "Go West, young man". Whenever people faced religious and political persecution, for the last many hundred years, they have gone West to the New World.
That worked for a good long time, until we ran out of new world to move to.
Why spend literally decades, possibly hundreds of years, trying to overcome a rigged system built on democracy, where political power is gained by the arbitrage of stupidity in the masses, when you can foot vote into a new seasteaded community literally built by and for libertarians and begin living as a libertarian immediately.
I say, don’t merely start a family and live a life under tyranny and then retire. Rather, considering moving your family into a libertarian community and retiring there.
I know such a place does not exist yet, but if it did, would this not be a far better tactic? If the US became libertarian by our efforts, would not the libertarians of the rest of the world flock here? They would.
Surely it’s incredibly easy to simply dismiss everything I say here with, 'but such a place still doesn’t exist."
Fine. It’s just words for now, but, I plan to start one and get it up and running. But even if I don’t, someone else will. Seasteading is not going to disappear. It gets easier and more inevitable with each passing year. If we populate a seasteading nation early with libertarians, we can create a mass libertarian culture.
If we let seasteading develop without us, then it will become just another statist institution getting in the way of the existence of a free society. And then you really will have to wait hundreds of years, because the next time creating a new libertarian society will become viable is via space colonization. Good luck with that.
This is a unique historical epoch, right now: Seasteading on the verge, no existing jurisdiction over the seas, prior to the establishment of one world government, with the US distracted by terrorism and its growing debt crises which is about to be kicked into overdrive by health care.
Your suggestion is certainly better than doing nothing, and a good one in the absense of a seasteaded libertarian community, but if in say ~5 years there’s an actual libertarian community of a few thousand individuals seasteading a libertarian community off the coast of California, you wouldn’t jump? Sure, it would have to make sense financially and job-wise, but given that it did?
eventually if you hit critical mass population, there’s no stopping it anymore.