It really does sound like a bunch of wealthy folks (and I don't mean your-town's-surgeon wealthy, I mean billionaire-class-wealthy) want to further remove themselves from laws that govern everybody else. Imagine this - a group of super wealthy bound by no laws of any nation but benefiting from them all. Terrifying.

A city of all billionaires sounds like a very small city.

Also, hiring for service jobs might be hard :)

Why hire? There's no law against kidnapping or slavery on a seastead.

Because the UN will get on you. While this isn't an issue for some random warlord in Africa if you're a tiny island who still wants to operate within the world you're still fucked.

The UN doesn't have an army

No, but it's members do.

And some of those members aren't afraid of using them, or their Navys, or Air Forces...

You're not wrong, but consider that there are plenty of atrocities, including slavery, happening right now around the world.

Happening in sovereign nations, not on floating platforms in international waters [1].

Items of interest:

Article 88: Reservation of the high seas for peaceful purposes

Article 98: Duty to render assistance

Article 99: Prohibition of the transport of slaves

Article 100: Duty to cooperate in the repression of piracy

Article 101: Definition of piracy

Article 103: Definition of a pirate ship or aircraft

Article 105: Seizure of a pirate ship or aircraft

The law is very clear on the authority of warships to intervene.

[1]https://www.un.org/Depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unc...

On the contrary, just pay them a few hundred thousand/year.

That's not really possible. Once they start pissing off other countries they will lose their access to deal with them and "benefit from them".

Why would they piss off the decision makers in our countries when they can buy their loyalty?

Except, it doesn't have to work like this. If a nation is being exploited via loopholes of some sort, she has the freedom to close those loopholes. An increase in small personal nations would necessitate a change in policy (mostly around taxes), but would not be disastrous.

Aside from taxes, most other laws exist to prevent one harming another. If someone goes to an island in the ocean, why ought we to care what he does there? To put it differently: many cities have regulations against shooting off fireworks due to safety concerns. Few rural counties do, because while people can still harm themselves, there aren't too many others nearby to injure.

>many cities have regulations against shooting off fireworks due to safety concerns. Few rural counties do, because while people can still harm themselves, there aren't too many others nearby to injure.

Many rural counties have them as well. In fact entire states have rules against fireworks.

Outside of places where wildfires are likely, firework ordinances are often there to prevent the people who are shooting the fireworks from hurting themselves.

>If someone goes to an island in the ocean, why ought we to care what he does there?

In an extreme case lets say a billionaire starts his own island nation, convinces people to move there to work for him, and eventually enslaves his workers and their children. This isn't an unlikely scenario--look at guest workers from SE Asia in the Middle East. What starts off as voluntary can quickly become involuntary.

We have enough powerful people in the world with no checks on their authority. We don't need to create more.

From a more practical concern, what's the upside to existing countries? The new island nation will only admit productive people, and will likely try to ship unproductive people back to their country of origin.

What stops Russia or China to send their troops there?

Nothing unless it's close to somewhere strategically important to the US. But I'm not sure I see your point.

They want independence from the US, but they won't survive in open waters without the US warships. Otherwise, if this island has any value at all, it'll attract Mexican cartels or Russian mafia or whatever else is floating in the international waters these days.

A billionaire with no regulations could probably afford to hire enough protection to guard against anything but an attack by a state actor.

In any case, that's yet another reason we shouldn't allow American citizens to set up their own private countries.

I'm sure these guys' will have an idea of 'competition' that involves a suspicious amount of interaction with the economies of the "nation-states" that they are supposedly bettering (only without all that inconvenient 'taxing' and 'regulation'). It'd be rather a different vibe if they were talking about genuinely starting from scratch somewhere, somehow, but this almost certainly isn't the draw.