Interland: The Country in the Intersection

(maximumprogress.substack.com)

24 points | by mhb 677 days ago

4 comments

  • isaacimagine 675 days ago
    While a neat idea I think that this would be something impossible to implement in practice. Saying 'the maximum permissive superset of all laws' hides a world of work and ambiguity.
  • karatinversion 675 days ago
    Good luck building a system of land law on top of that.
  • thriftwy 675 days ago
    > Say you’re starting a new country or city state and you want to improve on democracy. How could you do it?

    You need to get ahold of some unclaimed land first. Until you do that, discussing laws is moot.

  • flaque 674 days ago
    Vitalik made an interesting comment on Interland thats a bit hidden by being in the substack comments, so resurfacing it here.

    “”” Interesting! This reminds me of what Prospera wanted to do, where someone in a traditionally regulated category could choose to be regulated by any OCED country of their choice. In general, I think I agree that this approach has lower risk of having bad unknown-unknown consequences than most other approaches I've seen that would achieve the same level of libertarian-ness.

    Some significant game-theoretic risks that immediately come to mind:

    * If Interland gets into a strong rivalry or cold war with another country, that country could try to attack Interland by legalizing something terrible that happens to have negligible impact in the other country for situation-specific reasons but has a big impact in Interland. For example, Iran could legalize murdering Korean people. This would have a very small impact to Iran itself, but it would make Interland permanently useless as a cosmopolitan business and culture hub in addition to severe one-time costs on Koreans even if there's a waiting period before the law propagates.

    * Texas-abortion-law-style strategies. Another country that wanted to affect Interland policy could avoid banning X, but instead legalize private individuals doing some really harmful thing to people who do X.

    * There are lots of poor countries that are probably very easy to corrupt but also not really worth corrupting because not much (in dollar terms) is happening there. But if Interland law is tethered to the weakest one of those countries, then people could corrupt those countries in order to legalize terrible things in Interland.

    Possible mitigations:

    * Instead of using a total-intersection rule, use a 90% intersection rule. Something must be illegal in 90% of reference countries to be illegal in Interland.

    * Have a judicial body define a legal category of "private punishment behavior" (basically, selectively going after people with the goal of disincentivizing a particular act), and require that behavior to follow the opposite rule (it must be _legal_ in all or almost all reference countries to be legal in Interland). The definition of "private punishment behavior" intuitively feels similar to categories like "hate crimes", so there's probably precedent that you can carry over.

    * Allow the legislative body to remove a country from the reference country list if something terrible happens as a result of that country being on the list, and constitutionally rate-limit the use of this mechanism. In addition to the self-correcting property, this creates an incentive alignment: countries know that if they screw up and influence Interland law in bad ways, they will lose their influence over Interland. “””