Geoists Need a Spot in the Tournament

I'm going somewhere with this, I swear. TLDR: I think geoists should focus on starting a viral city over any other strategy.

I'm on Twitter @urbanlandrights.

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Outside of Geo-Libertarianism, I'm part of another niche community, the "Melee community." We play Super Smash Brothers Melee ("Melee"), a fighting video game, competitively.

In Melee, anyone is allowed to enter a tournament. Anyone, if they are good enough, can win. But only 5-6 people in the world are the best; with few exceptions in the last several years, anyone who has faced them has lost.

Not all of these top players are popular. One in particular, going by the tag "Hungrybox," is known for being ruthlessly un-sexy, sometimes running out the 8-minute clock during matches to win. This is "boring" or "lame" to many in the community.

What do you suppose would happen if tournament winners were decided by vote? Would Hungrybox win? No. Would he ever have won? Probably not. Would the game be fun, interesting or competitive? Not even close. Players would argue online about how THEIR play-style is the best, and they would back up their claim with pictures of their kissing babies, shaking the hands of construction workers, or cutting the ribbon at the opening of a free health clinic. The game would likely not be played at all.

The concept seems absurd, but that's what democracies do with economic policy: They poll, by vote, the dogma and feelings of the majority, grant a monopoly to the prevailing ideas and let them determine the fate of an entire nation for the next four years or whatever the term may be.

Participating in politics-as-usual, in my opinion, is a waste of time for geoists. We are the Hungrybox of economic policy. People won't even know their own ideas suck until they see us compete. Asking the average person to become a geoist is like asking them to vote for Hungrybox to win a tournament because he kisses babies. Why should they think he's different from any other player who kisses babies? Any player can make promises and kiss babies.

What we need is a spot in the tournament. Right now, there are 195 or 196 nation-state players, and although there are some skill differences among them, they all suck. Their play styles are ass. They're frauds. But people can't really know that because those 196 shitty play styles are the only ones they've seen in action. Expecting a majority to vote for any significant change in any jurisdiction, no matter how you draw it, is a fool's game -- or at least one for which I doubt we have time. Our overrated species is crashing fast. We could try to convince the proverbial lizard to warm itself by wearing a coat -- condemning ourselves to eternal frustration -- or we could simply point to other, coat-wearing lizards so the naked one can say, "Why don't I have that?" An observation is worth a thousand explanations.

I realize the irony of what I'm saying: in order to get an land-monopoly-ending economic system, we first need to break the land monopoly. But it's already been done to a small degree with Special Economic Zones (SEZ), and examples like Shenzhen in China show how explosive the growth can be even for a non-geoist city. A rent-sharing geoist city even in a relatively small, low-population area should have no problem.

If there's anything I know about human beings, it's that, no matter how impossibly crappy their lives are, they will vote for change in piecemeal at best, and likely not at all. They are creatures of fear. The mere existence of SEZ's shows we neither must nor should depend on their votes for progress.

So let's do it. Or maybe we can somehow convince Singapore to make the transition, since they're already pretty well structured for it?