The Next Generation Of Pilgrims Want To Start Their Own Countries That Float At Sea

Your hip, politically savvy friends probably say something like this with every election: "If [so-and-so] wins, I'm leaving the country."

That might soon become so possible that they'll have to follow through with it.

Seasteading is a Libertarian's dream realized. It involves setting up floating cities at sea, 200 miles off the coast of a country so as to not be subject to its laws. Call it an experiment in governance, call it a way to live under a new set of rules of your own creation, maybe even a way to start your life over. You may one day be setting up your own sovereign nation.

Patri Friedman (grandson of the famed Milton Friedman) is one of the main proponents of seasteading, and he set up The Seasteading Foundation to educate people and generate interest. And there's loads of interest. Even billionaire investor Peter Thiel, known for his outspoken Libertarian leanings, is pushing for this to become a practical reality.

There are some challenges, of course, but we already do a simpler version of this all the time. In an interview on Glenn Beck's Blaze Network, Randolph Hencken, executive director of The Seasteading Institute, explained that cruise ships already ferry about 10 million people a year - roughly the population of Sweden - and are already practically floating cities. Cruise ships have a certain political flexibility with their dock in one country and be owned by a corporation in another.

Patri Friedman sees this as a way for people people to get to live under the system they want and to create data about whether that system actually works.

He offers the following analogy:

"Why are people using governmental systems from 1787? A car from 1787 would be a horse!"