Fed up with America? Here's your chance to build a new country

As America becomes increasingly corrupt, both morally and politically, people are looking for a way to fight back. For some, the fight comes too late and hope for America is lost. For these people, they seek refuge abroad, in new countries, of their own design.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Imagine one day you are so fed up with life in America that you decide to emigrate. To where shall you go? Certainly not to Russia or China, dominated by atheist regimes. And not likely to poor nations that lack infrastructure and opportunity. What choices do you have with every scrap of land taken by one regime or another?

Perhaps the solution is to create your own land and start your own country. This is the dream of some libertarians who believe it is now possible to establish floating cities, essentially seaworthy-self-contained habitations that can ply the world's seas subject only to the minimum of international laws. Such a habitation would be a libertarian's paradise with only those taxes and laws chosen by the inhabitants.

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This is the vision of the Seasteading Institute. Patri Friedman, former Google software engineer and grandson of economist Milton Friedman is its chairman. The Seasteading institute has been seeded with $1.2 million from PayPal mogul, Peter Thiel and Friedman is hoping to make the vision a reality.

The plan is to use floating self-contained modules linked together like some kind of "Waterworld" configuration where people can literally live their lives at sea. Residing out at sea means those people would not be subject to any nation's particular laws. The population would be free to govern themselves however they like. They could build a libertarian utopia, or a religious habitation.

Seasteads as they might be called, don't have to float either. They can be anchored to the sea floor, or offshore on a derelict or specially-built platform. Their specific purpose would be to test new ideas for government as well as to provide long-term, possibly even lifelong habitation for people. They could also serve as tourist destinations. It would be a way to truly get away from it all.

The original plan has always been to situate a floating city out at sea, but the project is now looking for a host nation where they can establish their own laws, but within the territorial waters simply because the waters are more calm and predictable closer to shore. A sheltered cove or bay would be an ideal location. Nonetheless, the developers are serious about autonomy so any host nation would have to agree to leave the settlement be.

Such a development is already possible with existing technologies, but funding it and finding a host country willing to accept such development close to shore might be difficult. However, funds could be raised by other libertarians who would be willing to invest in the project and host nations would certainly see a boost in revenue via tourism and by supplying services which may still be required.

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Planners hope the first seastead is just years away and they will spark a revolution in how people live and govern themselves. Time will have to tell what the future holds.

For those who are interested, the seasteading project has a website which you can find here.

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