What Would Our Galt's Gulch Look Like?
Posted by katrinam41 1 year, 8 months ago to Ask the Gulch
Picture a real, functioning Galt's Gulch; a thriving community of independent souls working for themselves, growing a viable future as they rebuild what's left of the country. Marvelous vision we have of this shining new future, where each individual is responsible for only himself or herself, where logic and objectivity reign supreme. Now for the hard part, the nitty-gritty, the basic structure of this society. Where do we begin? Reading the comments in the various forums leads me to believe that we are indeed rugged individualist, with so many visions of how things should be, but how to get there is going to be a fascinating ride. What say ye, Gulchers? How do we get from here to there?
I’ve given a lot of thought to this. I think prosperity comes from a large number of people (ideally all of humankind) freely trading with one another in an environment with a trustworthy legal system and a government that stays out of the way. That means everyone needs a shared narrative. That narrative must value leaving people free to selfishly pursue their own dreams.
It’s challenging to get a small group of people to agree to this and even harder for a large group. In AS, many industrious people hide in a Gulch to escape a world that won’t respect their rights to keep the things they build. My reading of this is that even the most industrious will go into hiding, forgoing their own wealth and prosperity, if people do not respect their rights.
I find the idea intriguing but tragic. Even the most industrious people won’t create wealth in isolation. Wealth comes from people working hard and trading on a large scale.
I have dreamed of such a group creating a new country in a very remote place, maybe the arctic, under water, or in outer space, close enough to trade with the world but far enough to be left alone. The technology for a space colony is still in the very distant future, but if we somehow did it, the key would be passing along that shared narrative of selfish liberty to future generations.
I do not have a solution, BUT my American view is to try to make the world adopt some of the values of America, of people being born with rights and granting some limited powers to the government. That means being able to look squarely at how in the beginning the US government did not respect people’s rights and practice out-and-out slavery. It means looking at how we gradually began to respect people’s rights more and people became freer to travel, build wealth, and pursue their selfish dreams, without regard to how they look, their sex, their religion/ethnicity, their being transgender or nonbinary, or all the other things that have historically been excuses not to respect people’s rights. It also means looking squarely at how during that time we’ve come to accept government intruding into all areas of life taking a quarter of people’s income if they earn good money and a half if they earn a lot. The huge improvements and huge losses came over the course of a century. The Age of Enlightenment, which set the groundwork for respecting people’s rights, was only a few hundred years ago. The last century could be just a bump, with things getting drastically better or worse in future centuries. I don’t have a solution to build a hideout for people who respect one another’s rights, although I really wish there were one, but I try to push on the scale in favor of liberty whenever I can during my brief life.
If someone builds a large enclave, a non-nation or Gulch or whatever we call it, with borders open to the flow of people, capital, and goods and services, I will certainly want to visit and invest there, because I imagine a lot of wealth being created there.
I really think that’s what they tried to with the US Constitution, with mixed results. The theory is to get people to agree on a few very important things that make it not matter if they disagree on everything else. It’s easier said than done.
“For my own part, a community based on the pledge John Galt created would be a start, but even before that, a physical place would be necessary.”
Why a physical place? I don’t think you’re wrong, but what would be the virtue of it being a physical location?
“Whether it's a mutually agreed upon section of a country where each buys what they need or whether it's one very wealthy member selling parcels to the rest, doesn't matter.”
The trouble is every bit of land is part of a nation state. The oceans and Antarctica are not, but my understanding is people there are bound by even more rules.
My dream is investors would make a deal with a country that could benefit from jobs and investment to create a free trade zone with less government intrusiveness. I imagine this being in a place like Panama, like their Colón Free Trade Zone. I don’t know the details of that, but I know it’s less than magical because Colón is rough, and more than one person approached me claiming to have taken stuff from businesses in la Zona Libre to sell in the back market. But maybe it’s a model that could be improved on. That area feels like a crossroads of the world because of the canal, and it feels like it could possibly turn something with the prosperity of Singapore but with much more personal liberty.
My other dream is some sparsely populated area of Greenland, maybe remote enough left alone. It could start as an incubator for startups with young founders from around the world. It would be like Blueseed was supposed to be, but more remote. The deal would have to include easy immigration and very favorable tax treatment.
But all of the dreams have more ways they could go wrong than right. Still, I hope someone is working on one, under the radar, that I don’t know about.
“What does matter is that we all understand just what we are signing up for and that we actually value and practice those very basic premises. Like the fictional Gulch, the less rules the better.”
So many people want it. I hope it happens. Every time I think about it, though, I just wish the US would move in this direction. Creating it from scratch, in a world where there’s no more frontier, is difficult.