Article: The Really Creepy People Behind the Libertarian-Inspired Billionaire Sea Castles

"The Really Creepy People Behind the Libertarian-Inspired Billionaire Sea Castles" is an article by Mark Ames that was published today on the independent news site AlterNet.org.

The full text of the article can be read free of charge here:

www.alternet.org/story/147058/the_really_creepy_people_behind_the_libertarian-inspired_billionaire_sea_castles/

Excerpts: "The super-wealthy are already building their first floating castle, a billion-dollar-plus luxury liner that offers permanent multimillion-dollar housing with the best protection of all: moats made of oceans, keeping the land-based Americans they've plundered at a safe distance. The first such floating castle has been christened the 'Utopia' – the South Korean firm Samsung has been contracted to build the $1.1 billion ship, due to be launched in 2013. Already orders are coming in to buy one of the Utopia's 200 or so mansions for sale – which range in price from about $4 million for the smallest condos to over $26 million for 6,600 square-foot 'estates.' The largest mansion is a whopping 40,000 square feet, and sells for $160 million. [...] The floating castle is a longtime dream of libertarian oligarchs – a place where they can live their lives in peace free from the teeming masses of starving losers and indebted parasites and their tax demands.

"Since they've grown so rich off of America, they have enough spare change to fund projects like the Seasteading Institute, run by Milton Friedman's grandson, Patri Friedman, and financed by the bizarre right-wing PayPal founder, Peter Thiel. [...] Both Thiel and Milton Friedman's grandson see democracy as the enemy – last year, Thiel wrote 'I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible' at about the same time that Milton Friedman's grandson proclaimed, 'Democracy is not the answer.' Both published their anti-democracy proclamations in the same billionaire-Koch-family-funded outlet, Cato Unbound, one of the oldest billionaire-fed libertarian welfare dispensaries. Friedman's answer for Thiel's democracy problem is to build offshore libertarian pod-fortresses where the libertarian way rules."

Whatever one may think of libertarian billionaires or seasteading, this article is a prime example of smear journalism posing as "investigative".

Mark Ames is an American journalist and book author, long based in Russia.