
No Musky. Feudalism Is Best for Mars - youngbullind
http://blog.erratasec.com/2016/06/no-musky-feudalism-is-best-for-mars.html
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Kristine1975
So the same people who are "too stupid to vote" are at the same time smart
enough to "vote with their feet"? Naw, this is just the usual libertarian
drivel about how "the market will fix everything". This becomes obvious the
moment the author talks about "Democracies are always backed up with a police
state that coerces you, at the point of a gun".

Also how am I supposed to vote with my feet when doing so requires a space
ship etc, i.e. quite a bit of resources?

~~~
dalke
I'll add other objections.

> In space exploration, such barriers to movement don't exist

It takes a lot of training to operate a space station. Look at airplanes,
which are less complicated. Pilots need training for a class of planes, and
often for a single type. Switching between even different Airbus planes
requires re-training - switching from Airbus to Boeing requires much more.

Upgrading a submarine can require "fundamental retraining for nearly 60
percent of the crew."
[http://www.public.navy.mil/subfor/underseawarfaremagazine/is...](http://www.public.navy.mil/subfor/underseawarfaremagazine/issues/archives/issue_17/alaskal.html)

Even for normal ground-based job, we often expect it will take a few months
for a new employee to get up to speed.

Why should I believe there would be no re-training cost to switch between
space station types? That re-training _is_ a high barrier to movement.

> Then all the other space station dictators will get together, agree on some
> sort of "big charter" guaranteeing people rights,

So, a "United Nations" for space, backed by the point of a gun. And this will
be more effective than the current UN how? And this would be different from
current democracies, which "are always backed up with a police state that
coerces you, at the point of a gun" ... how?

> What I'm getting at here is that the best political system for space
> exploration looks a lot like feudalism, though one full of yeomen (who were
> free to move about) rather than serfs (tied to the land). It's the only
> morally defensible system of government -- nobody is coerced to follow laws
> they dislike, but is able to vote with their feet, and choose the laws that
> best suite them.

"Feudalism" is an ill-defined term. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism#Challenges_to_the_fe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism#Challenges_to_the_feudal_model)
. I do not think it's wise to depend on Marx's 19th century feudalism model
given the 150 years of development of archeology and history. I see the above
proposal as being much closer to the Goðorð system in Iceland, based on
traditional northern Germanic laws.

