Patri Friedman on the Competitive Governance Universe

At the center of the competitive governance movement is Patri Friedman –the co-founder and Director of the Seasteading Institute, who more recently founded Pronomos Capital, a venture capital firm devoted to transforming the “governance industry” by promoting the idea of startup countries.Patri was one of my first guests when I started broadcasting in 2009. Much has changed since he first launched the Seasteading Institute, and I invited Patri to share what he’s been up to and how the landscape (seascape?) has changed in the last 13 years.Seasteading and related land-based projects represent the next frontier for radical libertarianism, following in the footsteps of Patri’s father – the anarcho-capitalist thinker David Friedman – and his grandfather, the late Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman showed how free trade areas like Hong Kong could supercharge growth and lead millions out of poverty. Patri’s ambition is to revive the fading legacy of Hong Kong, enabling the establishment of a thousand new nations – floating or otherwise – to pull humanity into the more optimistic scenario for the future. However, as we will discuss, these new governing entities need not adopt libertarian principles to still advance the broader libertarian agenda of enhancing freedom and competition at the level of choosing one’s jurisdiction. What freedom could be more important?