I discovered the blog of Mencius Moldbug when Patri linked to this post a few months ago. You should follow that link and also this one, Mencius is well worth your time. He is one of the freshest and most interesting writers on the web, though eccentric even by libertarian standards. His ideas are promising and deserve to be presented without the less palatable garnish of his acerbic writing style.

The most compelling idea in the sprawling Moldbuggian corpus is "neocameralism". Neocameralism is a close relative to Patri's theory of Dynamic Geography in that both are forms of practical market anarchism. Its reasoning is straightforward: If you believe that government should be given incentive to govern well, then modern democracy must be thrown out. Simply trying harder to elect better candidates will not fix the familiar structural problems of democracy, such as plundering special interest groups, ever-expanding bureaucracy, and election contests with the intellectual content of an American Idol finale. However, if you think that security service providers (AKA "governments") form geographic monopolies (500,000 years of human history provides good evidence for this), then the Rothbard/Hoppe/Friedman vision of anarcho-capitalism with a competitive market in security must also be set aside as a pipe dream.

Neocameralism, then, is statist anarchism. It envisions a world filled with small monopoly states run by for-profit corporations. Neocameralism addresses many of the shortcomings of democracy and anarchy. Moldbug defends it well:

To a neocameralist, a state is a business which owns a country. A state should be managed, like any other large business, by dividing logical ownership into negotiable shares, each of which yields a precise fraction of the state's profit. (A well-run state is very profitable.) Each share has one vote, and the shareholders elect a board, which hires and fires managers. This business's customers are its residents. A profitably-managed neocameralist state will, like any business, serve its customers efficiently and effectively. Misgovernment equals mismanagement. For example, a neocameralist state will work hard to keep any promise it makes to its residents. Not because some even more powerful authority forces it to, but because it is very pleasant and reassuring to live in a country where the government can be trusted, and it is scary and awful to live in a country where it can't. Since trust once broken takes a long time to rebuild, a state that breaks its own laws has just given its capital a substantial haircut. Its stock is almost certain to go down.

I am provisionally convinced that a neocameralist world is likely to be more libertarian and better-governed than a world run by universal suffrage democracy. For-profit states are likely to follow libertarian economic policies, since those policies tend to create prosperous and interesting places to live. Conversely, socialism is an expensive program that attracts the indigent, not exactly prime clientèle if you are trying to turn a buck. Culturally, I expect a neocameralist world to be a patchwork of diverse burbclaves ranging from a straitlaced, caffeine-free Mormonville to a hedonistic New San Francisco. While not every state will be cosmotarian friendly, each person will have the freedom to choose where to live, presuming they meet the residence requirements of their preferred state. That sounds fair enough to me.

More importantly, my initial impression is that the logic is tight. Neocameralism seems stable and practical, or at least more so than Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism.

There are certainly difficulties with neocameralism. Transitioning to a neocameralist world is the first hurdle that springs to mind. Moldbug never clearly spells out a plausible strategy for getting from here to there. Then there is the minor matter of how shareholders in the government will keep the management under control when management presumably has all the guns. After all, in a democracy corporate shareholders can ask the government to enforce contractual obligations when management shirks its duties. Hopefully you see the problem that occurs with this model when management runs the government. Moldbug offers some technological solutions to this problem that are interesting but unsatisfying.

Still, Moldbug gives me hope that a libertarian future might be practical, which is valuable as the libertarian movement doesn't exactly have a surplus of hope. In a world that has gone through the FDR presidency, I don't see how anyone can cling to the hope that libertarianism might be achieved through a constitutional democracy. I came back from Mises University an anarchist convert, but I have since strayed from the faith due to doubts about its practicality. The arguments for dynamic geography are well-considered, but it abandons the 25% of the world's surface that humanity has historically lived on to sclerotic statism. Also, it is going to entail significant startup costs.

IANAM, (I am not a Moldbuggite), but Mencius, consider me intrigued.