The trackback system on Cato Unbound seems to be imperfect, so here is a roundup of the blog reactions to my essay, for some light reading for y’all over the weekend . I’ll be making detailed replies on the Cato Unbound site starting on Tuesday.

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it’s even harder to find people who will now commit to moving to a man-made island

Why do you need rich-world libertarians to commit? I suspect some of the eager first-movers will be poor people whose current governments are stifling and murdering them. Later, when seasteds develop their economies and offer a higher quality of life, rich-world citizens will begin to find them attractive.

Sometimes governments exaggerate the rents they can charge. That is why Detroit (the whole upper Midwest really), New York state, and California are failing, while (current recession aside) the South and mountains/west are booming.

So one answer to “how do they do it?” is “by being more prosperous than other places in the world outside the U.S.” They're certainly not more popular considered within the US.

Of course, since these numbers are 2000-2004, they also reflect high housing prices driving people away from those states.

The highest tax jurisdictions in the U.S. all have very poor internal migration statistics, but the popular ones all have very high rates of immigration from outside the country that offsets that. Partially that's a result of being very welcoming to immigrants. (People of an anti-immigration mindset tend to regard these states as important cheap labor and chasing away the middle and lower-middle class. It's true that those states tend to have expensive housing and a much wider gap between rich and poor.)

California's taxes have gone up, and the 2010 Census looks to be the first one where California will not gain a seat since becoming a state. California has seen an incredible exodus of people already in this country moving away, but it remains a popular destination for immigrants.

That's if we're defining popular as “places where people actually move to live.” If popular means something like, “place I'd really like to live if I could afford it,” things are a little different.

High tax areas in the US also tend to be wealthy. There's a bunch of reasons for that. (One could even point out that being able to deduct state and local taxes from federal income taxes gives wealthy states an incentive to raise taxes higher than they would be otherwise, in order to “keep money at home” that would otherwise subsidize poorer states.)

This is the line from Friedman that made me laugh out loud.

really?

I don't see how redistribution of income will work if all the rich people can leave at any time and go float somewhere else..

when taxes are more like a utility bill than our taxes, then what is not gonna be libertarian about it?

not only libertarians want to avoid taxes…

and if you take away taxes the rest of the rules are gonna be like neighborhood rules, wich are not unlibertarian at all…