Similar to this question, but on the galactic scale:
What would life be like for the common people on a libertarian planet?
My specific questions:
- How could a libertarian-minded galactic government be structured? *
- What would be the extent of the government's influence between worlds? **
- How would citizens exercise voting rights under this government? ***
In this Quora answer, which imagines what an Objectivist utopia might be like, https://www.quora.com/Objectivism/If-everyone-were-an-Objectivist-what-would-society-look-like-and-how-would-it-function, we get some extrapolations:
- Government would be restricted to police, military, and courts
- No entitlements, or regulatory agencies of any kind
- No Fed and no inflation
- Paper notes backed by hard money would be issued by private banks
Finally, here is a brief, worldbuilding scenario to set the stage:
I imagine a capital world, with a world government similar to a representative democracy, that decides to begin interstellar colonization, once relatively cheap interstellar travel is made possible. A variety of corporate charters are arranged between the government and private industries to assist in carrying out these expeditions to settle colony worlds. Eventually, these corporate charters are successful through a combination of support from the capital world and bootstrapping. Ultimately, however, the charters reject the legislative authority of the capital world, and they band together to supplant its ruling body. As a result, the capital world's government is reduced to a purely administrative role that best suits a libertarian ideology of governance. The worlds once under the control of the capital world's government become the property of the corporate charters, and a new ruling body is established to mediate economic(?) relationships between owners.
*
Suppose there are 500 systems, most of which are owned by a variety of publicly-owned and privately-owned corporations, wealthy families, or extremely wealthy individuals. In general I am assuming that it's necessary for worlds to interact/trade with each other, and that the cost of moving resources between them is not any more tremendous than the cost to move resources between countries today.
**
Let's assume that FTL travel is possible along a heretofore undiscovered absolute frame of reference, and time travel isn't possible by using it. You can get from the edge of the galaxy to the galactic center in a few months, but the more expensive your ship the faster you can go. Pure information can travel with this technology 10x faster than the fastest ship. Individuals own spaceships that have the capacity to travel within a star system in much the same way people own cars today, but traveling between star systems requires more expensive spaceships that only corporations or really wealthy individuals might own (comparable to the availability of private airplanes to individuals today).
***
There are no sentient aliens, only humans in this scenario.
Also relevant:
No Fed and no inflation
, this is completely false. Inflation is a natural phenomena. It happens when an economy/society experiences financial growth - which used to be extremely rare before the industrial revolution. The first time inflation was documented to happen - the Price Revolution - happened because the Spaniards brought back gold from the Americas - causing gold to be more common/plentiful than before - causing the value of gold to drop. Since back then gold = money, it basically caused the value of money to drop which is reflected by the prices of everything to rise $\endgroup$