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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   4088 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 18, 2024

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When it comes to the building of "parallel institutions" as a political strategy, what would a monarchist parallel institution in a modern, democratic society look like (other than either a 24/7 ren faire or a mafia syndicate)?

Buy land somewhere in the middle of nowhere and organize a town there. Never sell the land to your citizens, just "rent" at a pittance, but with rules attached. Maybe don't rent either--require buy-in to the company that owns the land. There are all sorts of rules against rent discrimination, but as far as I know no rules that you must not discriminate when seeking "private investment." So long as you retain ownership of the land it remains legally possible to control immigration (decide who you allow to live there), and when worst comes to worst you have a good enforcement mechanism to kick people out.

At this point your best defense is illegibility. Do really legally weird, technically complex things that judges won't understand and have no business ruling on. Use blockchain smart contracts as much as possible. Build tenuous chains of trusts managed by corporations owned by nonprofits owned by churches. Generally, make it quite difficult to classify what you're doing according to existing laws, thus forcing your enemies (and enemies will arise if you succeed) to either force strained interpretation of existing law or sponsor the creation of entirely new laws in order to target you. Ideally the whole thing takes place in a sympathetic jurisdiction (right now, Texas would be best, then probably Florida) where even explicit government rulings against you are not necessarily enforced.

Try to use dollars as little as possible (another reason to rely on crypto). They can be confiscated or inflated away.

The nice thing about such a circumspect strategy is that it's not coup-complete. Your resistance will generally scale with your organization. If you act fast you can have thousands of people living in your town before the federal government realizes anything must be done about it. Attract (and filter for) the right kind of people and the benefits of such a town will speak for themselves.

I'm no monarchist but I do think such "parallel" societies will become necessary soon. I want to raise my kids somewhere they'll have intelligent peers, an actually challenging primary school system, and no danger of state abduction if they say the wrong thing to a school therapist. I think many others feel the same and have reasonably resilient jobs or skills that can handle a move to the middle of nowhere to get such a community started.

I want to raise my kids somewhere they'll have intelligent peers, an actually challenging primary school system, and no danger of state abduction if they say the wrong thing to a school therapist.

Yes to all. So my kid is in a carefully selected private school. In the suburbs of a major city. This is a service you could buy today.

How much do you pay for that though? Seems like a humongous cost.

Cheaper than building your own Galt’s Gulch?

If everyone was paying private school tuition rates I think you could actually build a Galt's Gulch for no additional cost.

Possibly.

If true, that raises the question—why is private school so overpriced?

Gatekeeping through price is its main feature, so it's just following demand.

To a lesser extent this is true of housing in general. I think plenty of people would be happy living in much smaller houses/apartments if they were sure they could do so in a good neighborhood with other successful, like-minded people.

It makes me wonder about the legality of constructing some kind of "landshare" where people need to literally buy their way into the community. Most of the money would be going not towards the land they're buying, but some kind of community trust holding an index of stocks. This way you still get the price gatekeeping without the inflated land prices.

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