Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

other information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. My guest today is Patrie Friedman, Executive Director of the Sea

Steading Institute. The Institute's mission is, quote, to establish permanent autonomous

ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political

and legal systems. Patrie, welcome to Econ Talk.

Thanks, Ron. Tell us about sea steading. It's a plan on the word home steading, so give

us an idea of what it's about. Well, our idea is to basically build new city

states on the ocean, and even though it seems kind of crazy that building new countries on

the ocean is the best way to achieve a freer society to bring kind of libertarian ideas

into practical use. I've been thinking about this a lot for a number of years, and I think

that it's actually the most practical route. First, let's talk about the logistics of what

a sea stead would be like, where you're thinking about starting them and where they would

eventually end up, in terms of size and location. Sure. So they're built sort of like oil

platform. They're built on tall pillars to avoid the waves. And in terms of initial

location, right now we're thinking about something just outside U.S. territorial water.

So depending on what the lawyer say, that's something like 12 to 24 miles off the coast.

And eventually we want them to be outside the EEZ of any state. So that's outside 200

nautical miles. What is the EEZ stand for? That's the exclusive economic zone. So the state

has a limited set of rights, but the limited set includes important things like economic

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