F) Current Issues

The purpose of the whole OboxPlanet project is to present the idea of a stateless society as a respectable, useful and exciting idea. In the context of this chapter «current issues on earth», we want to focus on the part «useful». The OboxPlanet idea will have reached its goal when people, and especially politicians, consider a problem, they first ask themselves: how would the OboxPlanet people solve it?

One fundamental difference to the Earth is that on the OboxPlanet, the questions of right and wrong are clear and simple. To put it positively: You may do whatever you want with your body and your rightly acquired property as long as you do not physically threaten or harm the same rights of others. To put it negatively: The initiation of the use or threat of violence is wrong, is criminal, the so-called Non Aggression Principle, which points us back to Snap, the Spirit of the NAP.

This simplicity is useful and exciting.

For one thing, the more fundamental the questions, the easier the answer. Covid? Immigration? A simple question of who owns the land or the building and what rules he or she establishes for others to visit. Period.

Thereafter we can speculate how things would develop on the planet, who would establish what rules for which friends or customers regarding Covid or regarding migration. And for that part of our adventure,, we have the sections «Experiences on earth» for some inspirations.

The third section gives us space to imagine what we would like to have and think about how we can approach the OboxPlanet solutions on Earth. For Covid and Immigration, very simply: get the state out, let private owners decide or as steps in this direction: decentralize political competences.

For more entangled questions like «should we regulate AI”, the beauty is that the answer is clear and the question then arises: what would happen when no bureaucrats impose monopoly rules?

This type of thinking can avoid getting caught in a web of state restrictions which have distorted just about all aspect of our lives for years and decades.

Take AI. Since the state has meddled in our freedom of speech, copyright and our privacy rights, the idea that it may also need to play a role in AI is almost logical. After all, AI does use data that is already regulated. Then we proceed to ask “how, given all the other meddling, shall we regulate AI?” For a freedomloving person, this is frustrating. We feel caught in a web that strangles us ever tighter.

The OboxPlanet approach allows us a liberated perspective, step out on the balcony and take a breath of fresh air while looking onto the ocean.

Suppose there is no copyright. Suppose my data is protected the way I decided and agreed each tiime I shared data. Suppose there is no political correctness but community standards that are voluntarily respected for fear of merciless ostracism. The question for the OboxPlanet people are maybe to find rules for AI companies to calm their customers? A completely different question than handing it to our politicians. Politicians, of all people…

What experiences on Earth, past and present, help us understand life on the OboxPlanet?

We are now looking for conditions on Earth where we can test stateless solutions for political problems, in other words, we are now looking for examples of such societies . In the “Human Rights”- lab we mentioned a stateless society in the Old Testament and another historic example in Iceland around the year 1000. This will not help us much here, since they are too far off from our modern experiences and questions.

Let us therefore consider another example, maybe the historically closest and most familiar. In the words of Hans Hermann Hoppe:

The English settlers coming to North America were the last example of the glorious achievements of what Adam Smith referred to as “a system of natural liberty”: the ability of men to create a free and prosperous commonwealth from scratch. Contrary to the Hobbesian account of human nature — homo homini lupus est — the English settlers demonstrated not just the viability but also the vibrancy and attractiveness of a stateless, anarchocapitalist social order. They demonstrated how, in accordance with the views of John Locke, private property originated naturally through a person’s original appropriation — his purposeful use and transformation — of previously unused land (wilderness). Furthermore, they demonstrated that, based on the recognition of private property, division of labor, and contractual exchange, men were capable of protecting themselves effectively against antisocial aggressors — first and foremost by means of self-defense (less crime existed then than exists now), and as society grew increasingly prosperous and complex, by means of specialization, i.e., by institutions and agencies such as property registries, notaries, lawyers, judges, courts, juries, sheriffs, mutual defense associations, and popular militias.

Moreover, the American colonists demonstrated the fundamental sociological importance of the institution of covenants: of associations of linguistically, ethnically, religiously, and culturally homogeneous settlers led by and subject to the internal jurisdiction of a popular leader-founder to ensure peaceful human cooperation and maintain law and order.

From: On the Impossibility of Limited Government and the Prospects for a Second American Revolution, in Reassessing the Presidency, 2001

Have fun!

Now it’s your turn:

Which political issues are you most concerned about? Which one of these has no “Discovery Lab” on this website?

Things we could learn and implement from the OboxPlanet:

Wait and see..