Like Arnold Kling, I’m not impressed with Will Wilkinson’s attack on so-called libertarian democraphobia — but I enjoyed this comment from Grant Gould:
At the risk of getting all Turner Thesis on things, the availability of the frontier create a different sort of culture, which in turn creates people with different intuitions, even among those people are not on the frontier. I think seasteading is a great idea not because I want to live in the middle of the North Pacific but because I want to free ride off of its cultural effect on those of us on land.To take up cvd’s point above, it is fairly easy right now for politicians to engage in a particular sort of populist, nationalist discourse, in which there are few hard choices and lots of easy answers, in part because through a sort of Bayesian updating a voter cannot help but notice that every other country seems to go in for roughly the same sort of thing, so it can’t really be that bad. So long as that is an easy line of discourse, we should expect it to keep winning elections. We aren’t going to beat the public choice incentives in this sort of world.
To counter this irrational (but perhaps “rationally irrational”) fondness for impractical populism and nationalism, libertarianism needs a similarly irrationally appealing notion. Of the ones that have been tried, it’s hard to see any that have worked as systemically as the frontier. The notion of a frontier has a romance that the state seldom has managed to harness or even match.
A few hundred Ron Paul lunatics on a leaky barge with Friedman and Thiel could do more good for democracy than a hundred Catos. And if it actually works — so much the better!