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Ever since Ayn Rand dreamed up Galt’s Gulch, real-life libertarians have been inspired to try building their own utopias of freedom, out from under the thumb of oppressive governments. Over the years, I’ve reported on several of these attempts, mostly for the entertainment value of libertarians learning, too late and to their cost, why the state exists.
I’ve written about “Galt’s Gulch Chile“, a real-estate venture that pitched itself as a haven of freedom, but collapsed in a dust cloud of lawsuits as investors and developers accused each other of fraud.
More recently, I reported on the wildcat community of Rio Verde Foothills in Arizona, which found a clever way to skirt regulations about water, only to discover, to their surprise and dismay, that human beings still need water.
Now there’s yet another wannabe libertarian utopia. This time, it’s Vivos xPoint, a planned community in rural South Dakota.
It was originally the Black Hills Ordnance Depot, an complex of bunkers built by the Army for munitions storage during World War II. The military vacated the base in 1967, and the bunkers sat empty for years, until the land was bought by Vivos, a real-estate company. Vivos’ raison d’etre is redeveloping military-surplus bomb shelters and missile silos into luxury bunkers for rich preppers:
The owner and operator of Vivos xPoint, California businessman Robert K. Vicino, told News Watch that he has had great success in leasing more than 200 of the bunkers so far and that the project is highly successful and profitable.
Vicino also said the bunker complex has evolved into a thriving community of like-minded people, most of whom are happy to live there and support one another while realizing their dream of a self-sustainable lifestyle in an area relatively safe from disasters or potential ills that could endanger society and the world.
Let’s hear more about the kind of person who’d plan a project like this:
Vicino said he first became interested in developing or selling survival bunkers in 1982. Vicino said he heard a female voice in his head clearly tell him that, “Robert, you need to build underground bunkers or shelters for thousands of people to survive what is coming,” he said. “I attributed it to the Holy Spirit.”
According to another article, his son Dante Vicino agrees:
The name of the game at Vivos xPoint, Vicino said, is freedom, freedom, and more freedom. And lots of privacy: The bunkers are spaced about 400 feet apart, each one bounded by a 30-foot perimeter.
Within that space, tenants can do pretty much whatever they please within the lease, whether raising a garden, building a hothouse, or creating a small parking area or garage.
“…South Dakota is a sanctuary state for conservative people, military veterans, and police officers. Everybody that’s getting thrown under the bus by all the left-wing [activity] that’s happening. They’re all welcome here,” Vicino said.
Vivos markets itself to wealthy buyers who believe the collapse of civilization is imminent. Their pitch is that the development is remote and well-protected enough to ride out any catastrophe:
The Vivos website says the South Dakota bunker site will be safe from “the marauders during the aftermath of a large-scale cataclysm or catastrophic event.” The site has a U.S. map showing that southwestern South Dakota is outside the range of submersion areas along the coasts, known nuclear targets, the Yellowstone blast zone and “high-crime anarchy zones.”
Am I too cynical for suspecting that the list of “high-crime anarchy zones” includes anywhere non-white people live?
Vicino says he envisioned a peaceful community of respect, cooperation and tolerance. However, unlike the inexplicably harmonious Galt’s Gulch, it hasn’t gone so smoothly. It turns out, when you assemble a self-selected community of distrustful survivalists, paranoid preppers, and gun lovers, all drawn by the promise of getting to do what they want… they don’t get along with each other.
According to the article, Vivos and its residents have been furiously suing each other. There have been complaints to the attorney general and at least one FBI inquiry. Residents have alleged a long list of broken promises: no security, no road maintenance, no trash pickup, no water. And then there’s this eyebrow-raising rule:
Vivos uses a 99-year lease agreement, so residents do not legally own their bunkers.
…Lessees sign a 14-page lease and eight-page list of community rules, and those who don’t pay or violate the rules can be evicted. One rule states that Vivos residents are forbidden from talking to the media about the bunker complex or the company under the threat of fines or possible eviction.
Remember, you move to this place because you love freedom! Now just sign on this dotted line that says you relinquish your First Amendment rights.
This isn’t an aberration. Time and again, libertarians claim to value freedom above all else – but when you look at their planned communities, they invariably have one person or a small elite ruling with absolute power. In my 2016 post “On Seasteading and Liberlands“, I wrote about the proposed “Freedom Ship” whose captain would have been a dictator with an armed private security force.
In 2017, in “The One Percent Embraces Doomsday“, I mentioned another survival project pitched at preppers built into a decommissioned missile silo. It came with the stipulation that the board of directors can force people to labor, prevent them from leaving, and imprison them at will.
Vivos xPoint’s anti-free-speech rules aren’t obscure fine print that no one cares about. They’re being enforced. Residents claim that if they complain, talk to the media, or file suit over living conditions, Vivos evicts them – while keeping all the money they paid up front for that “99-year” lease.
(Interestingly, this mirrors a scenario from Atlas Shrugged. In my review, I asked why banker Midas Mulligan sells land in Galt’s Gulch rather than just renting it, allowing him to profit while keeping control. Vivos has done that exact thing, as real self-interested capitalists should.)
Astonishingly, it gets worse. According to multiple accounts, people who live there are afraid of the staff hired to work at the complex. Many of these complaints center around a worker named Kelly Anderson:
Anderson was shot in the chest during an August confrontation with Streeter, a former Vivos xPoint resident who is fighting his eviction. Streeter said he shot Anderson in self-defense after Anderson threatened Streeter and his family. Anderson, who was unarmed at the time of the confrontation, sent threatening messages about harming Streeter to an acquaintance just prior to the shooting, according to text messages records obtained by News Watch.
According to that text log, Anderson wrote: “I’m about to f— his ass up,” and “What he did isn’t right and I’m gonna educate this mother f—.”
…Bunker resident Rich Roehm said he always carries a .357 handgun but that after the August shooting, he removed the “snake shot” cartridges and replaced them with hollow-point bullets with far more stopping power. Roehm called Anderson, the subcontractor who lives and works at Vivos xPoint, “dangerous.”
…All four residents interviewed by News Watch during an October visit to the site carried handguns for protection.
This is a huge irony that I doubt any of the residents appreciate. They bought these bunkers because they want to be safe from the chaos of the outside world… but it seems the biggest danger they face is from the other people at the complex with them.
This is a lesson that libertarians stubbornly resist learning. They want to be free of the state, to move to a place where nobody’s rules will be imposed on them. But when you try to get away from democracy and all its safeguards, you don’t get rid of authority. It just winds up in the hands of people who have all the power and none of the accountability.
Libertarianism is, at its core and literally from day one, a fundamentally anti-democratic ideology, consistently supported by people who hate both majority rule and rule of law, and who want to “return” to an imagined “golden age” of pure, simple feudalism. They’re all both a bad joke and a dangerous one.
Residents have alleged a long list of broken promises: no security…
What, the evil Stalinazi marauders are already at the gates and poisoning their PBFs? That “safe space” sure didn’t last long…
Do these folks know that they can’t feed themselves off gardens in South Dakota?!?
Also, the bigger point; in a no-laws realm where everyone is armed and unstable, their biggest threat truly is each other.
Ayn Rand seemed to think citrus fruit could grow high in the mountains of Colorado, so I’d assume this bunch believes growing food in South Dakota should be easy-peasy.
yayy! i didn’t know you covered this beat but i’m thrilled to find out. i love to read about political jackasses getting what they asked for, and libertarians specifically are comedy gold.
You came to the right place – making fun of libertarians is totally my beat. 🙂 Just wait ’till my review of The Probability Broach starts later this month.
“The Probability Broach?” Sounds like one of the top-ten most awkward-sounding book titles ever.
My own bias when it comes to evaluating the value of government actions relates to this context: I believe the high-level function of government is to enhance the good things about civilization and minimize the bad things about civilization.
Good things include the collective activities of science, the ability to pool resources to achieve otherwise unobtainable goals, etc. etc. Bad things about civilization include wars, pandemics, the tendency of tiny minorities to dominate society – you get the idea.
Libertarianism, in my view, gets this formula exactly backwards by enhancing the bad things about civilization and minimizing the good things about civilization.
The community in this essay sure sound to me like a huge scam: give me your money and your basic rights in return for lex talionis.
@Raging Bee:
Worse, the evil Stalinazi marauders were calling from inside the
housebunker!Or, more correctly, the real estate office that owned the bunkers.
These people do not have the self-awareness to do ask ‘are we the baddies’ even after multiple publicized scams like this.
And, apparently, billionaires.
So, everyone the other 49 states would be well rid of? Excellent.
No. And what gol-darned idjit thought that South Dakota, of all states, was far from known nuclear targets? I mean, the state’s top three field crops are wheat, ICBMs, and corn, in that order, the last time I checked a geography-facts almanac.
(Answer: the suckers who bought those “leases”, of course!)
Picture getting a small bungalow house and putting approximately 50 cats under its roof, none of whom have previously met, almost all of them unneutered toms.
Except with guns.
Am I close?
scrolls down to read spoiler
Wait, what, just one person has been shot so far, and was a woman? Huh. Give it time, I guess?
Scratch a libertarian, find a feudalist …
… and where there’s feudalism, there will be serfs bonded to the land.
And in the comments:
See also: the Hunger Games. Or on a larger scale, Liu Cixin’s Dark Forest.
The libertarian impulse to get rid of government is an impulse to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Indeed. It seems impossible to get rid of authority. The best that can be achieved is to disperse it as finely and evenly as can be managed, and the best system for doing that that we have yet devised is “one person, one vote”.
Or on a larger scale, Liu Cixin’s Dark Forest.
OMFG that’s gotta be one of the dumbest “thought experiments” I’ve ever heard — and I’ve heard some doozies! Like, if it’s so dark no one can see anything, why would anyone go out hunting in a dark forest in the first place?! Have any hunters ever really done that?
And that whole “dark forest” shtick is disproven both by the history of human international relations and by Liu’s own astropolitical scenario in his own novels! I really liked his writing and character-development in “The Three-Body Problem,” but I gotta say I’ve lost a fair bit of respect for him and his thinking.
My favorite libertarian failure is Grafton NH, whose inhabitants had a lot of trouble with bears, because they could not agree to do such simple things as make trash containers bear-proof and not to feed the bears anywhere near their town.
I especially like how bears are great libertarians, much as cats are. These animals are mostly solitary, with little social interaction, and they are almost completely self-reliant, catching and finding their food in almost complete isolation from each other.
A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: Author Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling on the Free State Project | Vox
How a New Hampshire libertarian utopia was foiled by bears
Seriously, this happened. You should absolutely read about it.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling
I’m reading the article now. Pretty interesting and damning stuff, though I’m a bit less impressed by the seemingly obligatory both-sides-ism of the interviewer’s “ideology is always bad” shtick. That’s been a libertarian blither-point since at least the ’70s.
This is why I grew disillusioned over time with libertarianism. While exceptions exist, for most their concept of “liberty” is deeply authoritarian, ironically enough. As some critic said, “propertarianism” is a far more accurate name for it. Those who went into this community are complaining after they got what their ideology promised, since by most libertarian standards such a lease is perfectly legitimate, and they are big on the idea no one has duties enforceable to each other that weren’t specifically agreed on in general. I find it very hard to muster up any sympathy for them.
@Bekenstein Bound #7
It’s not just a nuclear target because of the plentiful ICBM silos. They say they’re clear of the Yellowstone blast zone, and while that’s true (they wouldn’t be instantly atomized by the explosion, or face scalding pyroclastic flows), they would still get around 30 cm of ashfall (which would drift MUCH higher in places – us Canadians know that 30 centimetres of snow can mean a metre – or more – to shovel through on the leeward side of buildings and other large structures…the same would be true of volcanic ash). This would instantly kill all of their crops and prevent more from being sown. Moreover, they are far enough north that the volcanic winter would be devastating. With food stocks being depleted and not replaced, and daily *maximum* temperatures averaging in the -20°C range for at least a couple of years (the worst-case scenario is not certain, but as I understand it, a decade of winter is not out of the question, and that’s IF we discard the controversial “Toba Catastrophe Theory” wherein a VEI 8 eruption causes a miniature Ice Age that could last generations), South Dakota will be quickly cleansed of all human (and most vertebrate) life…along with Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, and most of North Dakota, Kansas and Nevada. Most of Canada, and the northern and Midwestern states not blanketed by significant ashfall would also freeze (causing significant death), but at least there, recovery would be aided by the lack of ash (which would inhibit plant growth for many years in all areas with more than a few cm of ash).
Even if these libertarians were smart (though all existing evidence shows they are not) and prepared with greenhouses, heating them would be very challenging – combustible fuel sources would run out quickly, and solar power is a non-starter, as the ash and sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere would seriously limit the effectiveness of solar cells…wind turbines might be the only plausible option for electricity (although ironically, geothermal setups could provide suitable heating, if you could generate enough power to run pumps). And if solar energy is weak, the natural light that plants require to survive would also be limited, so you’d have to LIGHT the greenhouses as well to get a decent amount of productivity out of them. In short, a Yellowstone caldera-forming eruption would be a true nightmare.
Aside from a gigantic bolide impactor hitting our planet, these ultra-Plinian volcanic eruptions are the natural disaster that scares me the most, because they impact the WHOLE WORLD. Obviously, the short-term death toll is larger the nearer you are to the site of such an eruption, but given that even smaller eruptions, like the VEI 6 Tambora eruption in Indonesia, still killed millions of people in Europe and North America over a longer time frame, it is guaranteed that the largest possible eruptions on Earth would do a LOT worse.
And just for fun…if I had to prepare for every likely apocalypse, I’d probably go to the Guiana Shield. It’s high enough above the ocean to escape sea level rise, geologically-stable, geopolitically-insignificant (i.e. not a nuclear target), tropical (limiting the effect of a volcanic – or nuclear – winter), and has fertile soils, plentiful freshwater sources, and very few people (current population density of 5 people per square kilometer, which is barely higher than the entire nation of Canada). Also, it’s EXTREMELY isolated and hard to get to, so the chance of mass migration there in the aftermath of a disaster is small. But please don’t let the libertarians know – I really don’t want them to invade South America.
Don’t worry, I’m sure the libertarians are easily distracted by #QElon’s current blithering about Greenland.
The 3 disasters that would affect the whole world that seem likeliest to me, and that worry me the most, include nuclear war, another pandemic, and a repeat of Tambora’s volcanic winter. Larger eruptions are much rarer and large impactors are extremely rare. The others are significantly more common — the latter two, anyway. There are one to three significant pandemics in a century, and one to three eruptions big enough to cause a volcanic winter of note in a millenium. As for nuclear war, it’s harder to say, but direct, large scale military confrontations between great powers have historically been in the once-or-twice-a-century range right alongside pandemics. The last such saw two nuclear weapons used in anger, at a time when only three had ever been constructed. The largest unknown there is whether the prospect of being on the receiving end of some is adequate deterrent to using them. It seems to me that leadership that genuinely wants to do what it thinks is best for its country wouldn’t push the button, but such don’t tend to initiate war with nations that approach or attain being their peers in military power, either. If the leadership is the sort that has historically said things like “Apres moi, le deluge”, or fiddled while the capital city burned, or anything of that sort, then all bets are off. Which, in light of certain recent election results, means we’re screwed. :/