Peter Thiel and friends have a crazy idea.

>It goes like this: Friedman wants to establish new sovereign nations built on oil-rig-type platforms anchored in international waters—free from the regulation, laws, and moral suasion of any landlocked country.

Here's the fundamental flaw: they’re going to build an artificial island of sorts which is a major technological undertaking. It requires not only major initial investment but also continuous and expensive upkeep. How will they pay for it if they don’t believe in taxes and tariffs?

Will it turn out that the free market wills taxation and government regulation into existence?

Ahahaha, oh man.

It is possible that something like this could work for a while by skimming the population for the super-rich. But otherwise? There is no chance in hell. I'm not familiar with the intricacies of libertarian political economy, but I'm pretty confident in saying that the existence of a state-like presence is essentially inevitable in the long run.

But the transnational elite actually CAN have its cake and eat it at the same time with a scheme like this. The rich would be able to farm overseas markets for commodities as it always has, all the while avoiding having to deal with issues of accountability, governance, etc. In the end, it'll just end up as spatial separation of the international elite at best.

As for libertarianism, the state is inevitable. Within an organization of restricted size (IE consisting of multinational executives etc), the demands it makes may be reasonably controlled. However, it is impossible to reverse the process of accumulation at an individual level on a broad scale. For all the peons at the bottom of the ladder, the parallel corporate state emerges for lack of an alternative

There was once something like this called Sealand. It ended badly.