{"id":17515,"date":"2026-06-25T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/holistic.news\/en\/?p=17515"},"modified":"2026-06-23T11:14:59","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T09:14:59","slug":"libertarian-utopia-who-needs-a-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/holistic.news\/en\/libertarian-utopia-who-needs-a-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Floating Cities, Mars, New Hampshire: Where Freedom Looks for a Home"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Freedom Ship project tempts with scale<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This maritime giant would stretch 1.5 km in length and accommodate as many as 80,000 people. By comparison, Icon of the Seas, the world\u2019s largest passenger ship, can take roughly 10 times fewer people on board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Freedom Ship is a floating-city project that drew global attention in early June. <\/strong>Freedom Cruise Line International, the organization claiming it can raise 16 billion dollars to build this monster, released a series of highly suggestive visualizations that took over the internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The people behind the project argue that this vast floating city would circle the globe non-stop, without calling at ports. No port infrastructure in the world could receive it anyway. Its decks would contain not only residential districts, office buildings, entertainment venues, and even a stadium, but also primary schools, secondary schools, and a university.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A country without taxes has a catch<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Freedom Ship offers another version of a dream that keeps haunting enthusiasts around the world: how can people break free from the jurisdiction of states and arrange their own ideal world? How can they build a place where human relations start anew, and where old, rigid political and legal rules no longer restrain human innovation and energy?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For now, the project\u2019s authors have presented only the outline of Freedom Ship<\/strong>, and no one yet knows what flag would fly above the vessel. If it sailed under the flag of an existing state, that choice would automatically tie the ship, and everyone on board, to the legal order of the country where the vessel held registration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
Photo: press materials, freedomship.com.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Libertarians search for a country on the ocean<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Today, however, enthusiasts of creating \u201cstates\u201d on the open sea gather mostly around The Seasteading Institute, or TSI<\/strong>. The initiative began in 2008 and gained attention above all thanks to Peter Thiel, the famous tech billionaire who co-founded PayPal with Elon Musk. Thiel supported TSI with nearly 2 million dollars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TSI wants to create artificial floating island-towns on the high seas. Outside the jurisdiction of any state, such places would, at least in TSI\u2019s promotional language, become a paradise for people who love complete freedom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ocean quickly presents the bill<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

From the very beginning, however, the libertarian vision of life in maritime \u201ctowns\u201d has run into one problem after another. The concept promises life without conventional government interference and with only a minimal organizational structure. Reality responds with engineering, weather, logistics, and money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, designers would have to build offshore platforms that could safely house people.<\/strong> The high seas bring dangerous storms that challenge even specialized ships. Flat, not especially streamlined platform-towns would face an even harsher test.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then come transport and supply. Residents would need food, water, energy, medical equipment, construction materials, and reliable transport links. Life on the high seas simply costs a great deal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The state will knock anyway<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Finally, politics enters the picture. How could such platforms remain genuinely independent from states that naturally want to control their neighborhood? These technical, financial, and political obstacles appear large enough, and the proposed solutions weak enough, that TSI has not gathered a large and wealthy enough community of followers.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That does not stop Joe Quirk, the head of TSI, from presenting seasteading as an answer for people tired of high taxes and the omnipresent state. In a text published by CNN, Quirk argued that people who want to live in a country that matches their values and lifestyle should consider creating one themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He also pointed to the open ocean<\/a> as the great unused space of political imagination. In his view, almost half of Earth\u2019s surface consists of a blue expanse beyond state sovereignty. He argued that floating startup cities in international waters could soon become economically viable as construction materials grow cheaper, greener, and easier to produce through technologies such as 3D printing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite such assurances, repeated for several years, one may look in vain across seas and oceans for platform-islands where new societies, supposedly liberated from government, now flourish. <\/strong>Technical, financial, and political problems mean that, at least in the near future, no such project will float freely on international waters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A city on Mars is supposed to be a new beginning<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If not on the oceans, then perhaps on\u2026 Mars? After all, Elon Musk has for years appeared in a T-shirt bearing the slogan \u201cOccupy Mars.\u201d The richest man on the planet, obsessed with space exploration, argues that a city will arise on Mars within his lifetime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2024, The New York Times<\/em> described Musk\u2019s Mars project<\/a> as more than a technological ambition. The paper portrayed it as a central vision that shapes nearly every major business undertaking he pursues on Earth. According to that account, Musk\u2019s dream of building a civilization on Mars has influenced most of the six companies he runs or owns.<\/strong> Each of them could, in one way or another, contribute to the creation of an extraterrestrial colony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Musk also wants to radically reshape the state system. He showed that clearly in 2025, when he took charge of a special department created by Donald Trump to significantly slim down the federal apparatus of power. In Musk\u2019s ideal world, the state would look very different. Above all, it would be much smaller. The enormous rockets and spacecraft produced by Musk\u2019s company SpaceX would serve as tools for reaching the ultimate goal: Musk\u2019s own utopia on Mars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
Gemini AI\/Wybranowski<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Mars Society sees it differently<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Musk is not the only figure interested in the Red Planet as a place for colonization and new civilizational frameworks. For nearly 3 decades, the Mars Society has operated actively in the United States, promoting the vision of building a colony on Mars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I spoke <\/a>with its president, Dr. Robert Zubrin, he voiced some criticism of Musk\u2019s specific vision, although he generally supports the billionaire\u2019s passion for space. Zubrin does not expect Mars to develop as 1 vast metropolis, even though Musk speaks of a future Martian city of 1 million people reached by thousands of spacecraft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Zubrin\u2019s view, the future will look different. Mars will not have 1 city, but many smaller centers of colonization. The most successful of them, he argues, will attract immigrants by offering the most appealing model of life. He believes that free cities created by people from free societies would develop better than cities founded by colonizers who bring authoritarian or otherwise restrictive models with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not one city, but many worlds<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Zubrin argues that accelerating technological development will make travel<\/a> to the Red Planet relatively affordable within the next few decades. Reusable rockets, such as those SpaceX builds, play a central role in that expectation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our conversation, Zubrin said that some people will want to reach Mars precisely in order to build a new society under new rules. In his view, many people already find social conditions on Earth unacceptable. He also stressed that Earth offers no real space where people can freely organize themselves from scratch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Antarctica, he noted, falls under strict international supervision, so no one can simply go there and create a completely free community. For Zubrin, the whole point lies in building a new social order from the ground up. He added that the existence of the Mars Society, and the absence of any comparable Antarctica Society, reflects that difference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notably, Zubrin left aside the dream of creating mini-states on seas and oceans. That omission says a great deal: he appears to regard oceanic libertarian experiments as entirely unrealistic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Manchester,
Manchester, New Hampshire Skyline<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

New Hampshire is the most realistic experiment<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

But what if the most realistic plan for creating a libertarian paradise on Earth involves carving out a piece of\u2026 land? No ocean platforms. No Martian bases. Just an actual territory that already exists under the control of a state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Members of the Free State Project, or FSP<\/strong>, have tried to follow exactly that path. FSP is a libertarian organization that wants to transform the small American state of New Hampshire politically and arrange it, at the state level, according to libertarian principles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here, freedom has a zip code<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Jason Sorens, the founder of FSP, told me that he launched the Free State Project in the summer of 2001 because he had grown tired of American politics. He saw no realistic path for libertarians and classical liberals to gain a majority in Congress. So he concluded that the better strategy would involve finding a freedom-friendly state, recruiting libertarians to move there, and pushing their ideals at the state level. The movement eventually chose New Hampshire after the state\u2019s governor invited its members to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From a libertarian point of view, New Hampshire offers one great advantage: for many years, people have regarded it as the American state most sympathetic to libertarian demands. At the state level, authorities show unusual restraint in controlling residents\u2019 lives, and they also respect public money. Consider the pay of members of the state legislature. The amount has not changed in more than 130 years and remains just 100 dollars\u2026 a year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another obvious advantage, in FSP\u2019s eyes, lies in New Hampshire\u2019s small population: fewer than 1.4 million residents. If enough energetic libertarians from across the United States move there, they can play a serious role in state politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Estimates suggest that over the past 20 years, between 7,000 and 9,000 libertarians have moved to New Hampshire as part of FSP. Yet FSP members themselves admit that this number still remains too small to shape the course of events in New Hampshire in a decisive way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n