Just curious, has your neighbor's land sold yet?

I would attempt to do so too, CircuitGuy!

I have posted additional information and several photos of the property my neighbor has for sale on page five of this thread:

http://baexpats.org/topic/32636-is-there...

I was able to confirm that the second house (not pictured) is located on the adjacent parcel of land, but it is very small and not in as good condition as the house in the photos.

I search at least onece a month for "casa quintas" (residencial farms) in all of Argentina on the Re/Max Argentina website. My nieghbor's property is by far the "best buy" I have seen since I bought my own casa quinta five years ago after finding it on the ReMax website while I was still living in Ciudad Buenos Aires.

What my neighbor's buildings lack in regards to their present condition is clearly offset by the size of the property for sale (20,000 square meters).

At about $4.25 USD per meter2, the land is priced at less than half the price of undeveloped lots in the nearby village (1KM from the property).

We are trying to create this in New Hampshire through the Free State Project http://www.freestateproject.org.

In many ways because of loved ones who don't seek such a setting. That could be a motivating factor to move there all the sooner.

Not usually through my own choice, I have lived in over 60 places in my life. Many of those were part of a search for survival.

In all of mankind's migrations to greener pastures, people tend to take their problems with them and find them infesting and recurring in the new places.

If you find a place you really like for its natural treasures--food, water, climate, resources, technology--work at making its social and political climate safe and pleasant, too. Military enforcements are neither safe nor pleasant. They are not the mainstays of civilization.

In today's world one can choose one's associates, not necessarily as physical neighbors but as online companions. It is not necessary to pile them all into one village. We can have philosophical and even business interactions at a distance.

My current lifestyle lets me avoid government interference as much as possible, too small to be a nail to be hammered down. I have few needs and wants and have all the intellectual stimulation and good physical health I could want. So I don't feel a need to run away and hide out in some other idyllic locale, though I might like to visit there occasionally to enjoy kindred spirits, especially if you build the Gulch in the mountains.

This virtual Gulch is really intellectual stimulation a-plenty, and not all of it pleasant. Sometimes it feels like walking through a beautiful valley with venomous snakes in the underbrush, ready to strike at seemingly no provocation.

I respectfully submit that we work at turning the world at large into a more peaceful, productive and rewarding place. This is a very small globe, and it's running out of places to escape to. And such escape would be short-lived as long as the general hell keeps growing. Removing force, fraud and predation from human relationships is worth working at to reach an objectively happy co-existence, one without conflict of interest in an atmosphere of lively diversity and creative collaboration. Then we can truly reach for the stars.

You Are Fun, Jan! . I'm no student of law, but there
*are* those here -- I've heard that our system is derived
from english common law with criminal and civil and
crimes and torts;;; I even took business law before
graduation, once. . did OK. . but the best law, it
seems to me, ratifies what mom and dad told me
was right, when I was growing up.
but I was lucky;; I had a mom and dad who raised
me the best they could.

as an engineer, I would design the "law system"
to (1) keep honest people honest, and (2) put those
away who did not respond to (1). . the two degrees
of proof -- beyond reasonable doubt and preponderance,
or whatever they are -- seem to make sense, when
you contrast the "sentences" in each realm.

so, we need a good judge. . a freedom judge like
Napolitano, I'd say.

yes? -- j

p.s. have you read the poem I just posted? . first wife
and I used to call them "pomes" for a joke. . I typed them
on an old woodstock typewriter and tore up any which
had mistakes. . tedious, since I'm not a perfect typist.
woodstock::: https://images.search.yahoo.com/images/v...

Gidday cobber, just check on the rainfall situation of your 'ranch' (did you mean a station? ) before you up sticks for this side of the black stump.
Love to suck the sav with you but i drove just 40 minutes out of town yesterday and 3 of the 4 rivers are 100'/. Dry. So thats no fish, for starters. Not meaning to piss in your beer, just saying its not all dinky di here.

Yes. Should there not be some discussion of whether we retain English Common Law? Mercantile Law? How much of the 'wheel' do we want to reinvent? How tabla rasa do we want to be?

The complex stuff we have a pretty good handle on, I think. It is the simple things that are getting overlooked. I am a geeky person, not a legal or organizational savant, but my spidy sense says that if we get a location for the Gulch and then go there without having the pieces in place, we will do a grand bellywhopper. Maybe we can pick ourselves up and run again, but I would rather not have the experience. (Wm and I made every mistake possible in starting SH...and I think we may have invented a couple of new ones...but I can learn.)

Thank you for taking the time to discuss this with me, johnpe1.

Jan

the manual has grown with your company, its complexity,
and with regulations . . . I bet. . as would our social
contract in the Gulch, I bet.
we start with -- maybe -- Jefferson's original declaration,
saying "life, liberty and property," granted by the
nature of reality. . then, in the constitution, we add
the bill of rights without requiring that they be
amendments . . . and we include legislative approval
of regulations, etc.
in short, we learn from the u.s. experience, and
build on it.
Napolitano, since we don't have Narragansett, might
be our man. -- yes? -- j

I would because I laid out what I want to facilitate in previous comments on this question.

You will also be invited, LaissezFaire.

We have a number of individuals who have agreed to be the Gulch's militia should a physical Gulch be made manifest.

As for sickness, this is more of an issue, although progress has been made on that front as well.

As for "staying off the radar", unless we have some people with net worths > $100 million, I honestly don't think that the government bureaucracy is efficient enough to even bother keeping track of us.

How about the Great Bird of the Galaxy? I have met some incredible people here in the Gulch, yourself amongst them.

I never responded to your comment on law enforcement in the Gulch. Back when this blog was first beginning, someone posed the question, "Who makes bricks in the Gulch?" My LE example was along those lines: We have a great philosophy, and we are quite certain that if we got a chance to put it into effect we could show the world what free people engaged in free enterprise could do. What I do not feel we have is a picture of a functioning society.

Let me put it this way: The original Employee Manual of my company had a single sentence: Do all the good stuff; don't do any of the bad stuff. The EM is now 50 or so pages long - because even intelligent and honest people do not follow that rule. I am trying to warn people that we need a clever plan that will allow us to run a town, not just an ideology that can conquer the world.

Jan

Given those parameters then, how do we know that it (or they!) don't already exist?

My first was Fountainhead. Then I got hold of Atlas Shrugged, in 1963, read it 3 times, and it's been my "bible" ever afterward!

I do believe that Ayn's rants about god and religion brought disfavor heavily upon her work. While I also detest relying upon blind faith, Ayn would have been wiser to not attack so vehemently. Not that she was wrong, but it was lousy PR!

I lived for a while within reach of Branch Davidian, which is well outside Waco. Of course there was no real reason for the government attack on that complex, which destroyed the big main house and most of it's residents. Supposedly the goons were after it's leader for something relative to firearms ownership, but heck, he visited Waco regularly and played in a band there. If he had been a dangerous criminal (he wasn't) they could have nabbed him anytime.

Today there is just a small area with headstones of some of the victims, and little else. Sad.

Dean, I lucked out in that Fountainhead was on their summer reading list in junior high, and I convinced them, hey! You can fulfill your whole summer requirements just by reading one book!
As for so many of us, once you've read one of her books, you're hooked.

This government owns and operates the so-called judicial system. In a Gulch it runs to binding arbitration if the disputing parties so agree, and otherwise the perhaps-damaged party becomes judge, jury, and executioner. The other side of that coin would be balanced by our sense of "reasonable". One day I'd hope to get to writing a full article on all that.
There are answers for about everything, but they really need to be spelled out!

I would love to be in a real gulch. I suspect we would have a problem in that so many people would want to come in. All the producers and tax base would leave the real world just like the book. This would be a threat to other countries and ultimately man being man others would want to destroy it. We would need a means to defend the gulch.

I'm proud to know you. . may the bluebird of happiness
fly in your sunroof on this beautiful day, Jan!!! -- j

Thank you for the look up. Co-founder, actually. A pretty good med tech (me) and a world class programmer (Wm) met in a martial arts class (!), became friends, and double-dared each other to bootstrap a company based on the intersection of their expertise.

We make the finest LIS in the world.

Jan

"Secretive" is probably not possible these days when the spies are everywhere. We've all seen google and other mapsites with geo-views. Thus we consider our homestead as our Gulch, which is already "real", but has room for only a few allies; that's real. Problem as always is that the Rulers remain in charge, busily being our enemies and with all the big war-tools.

'Tis our Switzerland, except that Gov doesn't provide our tools of self-defense!

Worth consideration, for sure! But it wouldn't be too secretive there, so there would have to be some means of keeping the parasites from the outside away.