27 - Network State Conference 2026 - Christian Henrik Nesheim on From Subjects to Customers

Hello everyone. I have five minutes to explain to you how we can set the world free. Please wish me luck. So let's start with the fundamental problem. States do not treat individuals well. They subject us to taxation. They restrict our movements. They regulate us. And they even conscript us and send us to war. And the question that we need to answer is what is a practical way of making the state respect individual freedoms and property rights. Crypto is part of the answer, but of course crypto doesn't do you much good if your physical person is in say a goolog. Is the answer voting harder? No. Doesn't work for reasons we don't have time to get into right now. But we need strategies that don't depend on the majority of people having good judgment. When I was younger, I used to think that the answer was to change people's minds about government. Who here has spent time and effort advocating for things like individual liberty, smaller government, and so on with friends and family? Show hands. Now, keep your hand up if that usually worked. Yeah, that's what that's what I suspected. I've made my piece with the observation that voting or debating our way to freedom is not going to work. So what actually works in bringing about freedom? Well, I think in a word leverage. So what does it mean when I say to have leverage? What makes a powerful institution respect individuals? It is when that individual has options. And we understand this from consumer markets, right? Worse um many options and low cost of switching gives you better terms. Few options and high cost of switching gives you worse terms. Netflix provides uh good service at a very low price because switching to Amazon Prime is quick and easy. The DMB does neither of those things because where else are you going to go right now? Everyone understands how this principle applies to negotiations, to goods and services, to employment, or even to the dating market. But it also applies to what Titos Gable of the Free Cities Foundation calls the market for living together. Now most people don't see themselves as customers of the country in which they live. So they've allowed themselves to be monopolized by a single country. They have their home, their citizenship, their business, their banking all in a single country. And so of course that country has enormous leverage over their lives. They can raise taxes. They can regulate more. They can restrict more knowing that leaving would be hard because you have high cost of switching. And as a result most people are not customers of the country in which they live. they are subjects to it. The difference between being a subject and a customer is simply whether you have options. And if we want better treatment from countries, we need to subject them to competition. And the way to do that is to increase the number of people who have easy options. And the great thing about this strategy is that we don't actually need everybody to have options for most people to benefit. In fact, we don't even need most people to have options for this to work. And that is because economic activity is highly concentrated. This is the paro principle, right? um a very small minority of people you know like 2% 3% maybe they uh account for more than half of all investment spending and tax revenue. So the state doesn't have to lose a lot of people in absolute terms for them to lose a huge for the state to lose a huge chunk of its economic base. And in fact just the potential for losing these people can't be enough for the state to change its wicked ways. And if we give this small minority of people credible alternatives and easy exit, then it quickly becomes very expensive for the state to treat individuals poorly. There's our leverage. And when this competitive pressure improves the terms for everyone, even the people who don't have the option to leave benefit from the freedom of those that do. And now technology is supercharging this leverage by making talent and capital drastically more mobile. So more people can now obviously uh run companies or serve clients or manage teams remotely. Um travel communication has become cheap. So uh living abroad relocating is easier than ever. And of course meanwhile the nature of capital itself has changed. Capital used to be tied to geographies. It because because capital used to be tangible mostly it was tangible, right? So the issue with tangible capital is that you can't move it. You can't very easily redomicile a factory or a building or heavy machinery. And so they're stuck in place and they have to just put up with whatever the terms that jurisdiction sets. Intangible capital on the other hand is easy to move. Software, brands, proprietary tech, these things can live practically anywhere. They can, as my friend Andrew Henderson says, go where they're treated best. Now look at what's happened to the composition of capital and composition of assets in the last several years in the last 50 years. The most valuable companies in the world right now are all built on intangible assets. And when talent and capital become mobile, the leverage moves from the from the state to the individual. So it's not It's tech. It's tech. It's not it's not debating or voting that actually moves the needle. And the job of investment migration, which is the market in which imi has made its community, is to accelerate and facilitate the mobility of individuals and their capital. And this effort is already well underway. In the last decade alone, 350,000 people have obtained citizenship by investment. A further further 700,000 people have obtained residency by investment. And these are just the people that are buying it. Of course, people who get citizenship and residency in other ways, that's an order order of magnitude greater that number. And this number is growing every year. And so I want you to ask yourselves, how do you think governments would treat us if we all had multiple citizenships and residencies? If we all had mobile assets? If we all had a plethora of welcoming jurisdictions to pick from? Well, I bet they would have to stop behaving like rulers over captive subjects and start behaving more like businesses that need to compete for discerning customers. >> Thank you. Give a round of applause to Christian. >> Thank you so much to customers. Thank you.