The Sad Tale of a Silicon Valley-Funded, Libertarian 'Startup City' (restofworld.org) 320
RestOfWorld.org tells the story of a libertarian 'startup city' in Honduras that was "supposed to be a privatized, Silicon Valley-funded paradise."
Co-founded by 37-year-old Venezuelan Erick Brimen, "Próspera's founders promised to enrich the local community, even supplying water to a nearby village. But relations with neighboring communities deteriorated. Then, Próspera turned off the taps..."
Próspera's founders believe the future of government lies with privatized startup cities. They belong to a movement with deep roots in U.S. libertarian circles: one that wants to redefine citizenship and governance in tech-consumerist terms. It has gained momentum in recent years, as high-profile Silicon Valley figures, like PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, put their money behind startup city initiatives.
Some governments have been drawn to the idea, too, hoping it will attract foreign investment and spur economic growth. In 2013, Honduras passed a law allowing people like Brimen to set up semi-autonomous, privately run cities, "zonas de empleo y desarrollo económico" (zones for employment and economic development), or "ZEDEs" — pronounced "zeh-dehs." These cities are to be governed by private investors, who can write their own laws and regulations, design their own court systems, and operate their own police forces. The Honduran government granted Próspera ZEDE status in late 2017. Subject to limited government oversight and few legal restrictions, a set of for-profit firms incorporated abroad by Brimen and his business partners will govern the city — with ambitions to expand across [its Honduran island] Roatán and onto the Honduran mainland.... This year, skeptical Hondurans organized weeks of anti-ZEDE protests across the country. They fear cities like Próspera will leave ordinary people no better off than they were before, while ceding to profit-driven investors the power to decide what's in the public interest...
Applications for [Próspera] residency require a background check, a Honduran residency permit, and an annual fee — $260 per year for Hondurans and $1,300 for foreigners. Prospective residents will also have to sign something called an "agreement of coexistence," which lays out all the rights and responsibilities of Próspera residents and Próspera's obligations to them. Brimen characterized it as, "if you could make the social contract a real contract." The agreement incorporates Próspera's resident bill of rights, which is modeled on the U.S. Bill of Rights but with some decidedly libertarian twists. Government services will be centralized and automated through ePróspera, an online portal modeled on the much-praised e-Estonia system developed by the Baltic nation. From the comfort of their homes, Prósperans will be able to pay taxes, incorporate a company, transact business, and even buy real estate. They'll be able to vote, too, but their franchise is limited. Residents elect only five of the council's nine members. Landowners vote for two of the five, with voting power pegged to acreage. Buy more land, buy more votes. Próspera's founders choose the four remaining council members, and a six-member supermajority is needed to alter policy.... Government services will be provided entirely by a contractor...
Effective tax rates will sit in the low single digits, and, in place of Honduran courts, there's a private arbitration center. But where the business inducements enter unprecedented terrain is health and safety regulation. Próspera won't impose rules so much as curate prix fixe and à la carte menus of rules. Companies will be able to opt into an existing regulatory regime — choosing from dozens of countries and U.S. states — or they can Frankenstein together an entirely novel code, mixing and matching rules from different jurisdictions and even inventing new ones. [The building code for one new construction site is a pastiche of Honduran and U.S. law.] The lone requirements: sign-off by Próspera's governing council and a liability insurance policy, most likely underwritten, [Próspera co-founder] Delgado says, by offshore insurers.
RestOfWorld carefully chronicles how Próspera became unpopular with locals. In the summer of 2019, Próspera connected a nearby village to its own water supply. Then started billing them. (Though the water bills eventually stopped.) After protests over the fact that few construction jobs went to villagers — and how Próspera's armed security guards began asking pedestrians for identification — several local groups issued a critical statement while villagers elected a new council empowered to speak for them.
It all came to a head when the council asked Brimen to cancel a public meeting (due to surging Covid cases), which Brimen insisted was a violation of his free speech. He held the meeting anyways, local police were sent to break it up, and one of Brimen's bodyguards "scuffled" with one of the officers as his other bodyguards whisked him to safety. The incident made the local news and social media. Then the next month "Próspera Foundation" threatened to cut off the village's water within 30 days if they didn't formally request the foundation's intervention in writing.
The village instead appealed to a local congressman/mayoral candidate, who by mid-January had fully restored the village's water supply.
Co-founded by 37-year-old Venezuelan Erick Brimen, "Próspera's founders promised to enrich the local community, even supplying water to a nearby village. But relations with neighboring communities deteriorated. Then, Próspera turned off the taps..."
Próspera's founders believe the future of government lies with privatized startup cities. They belong to a movement with deep roots in U.S. libertarian circles: one that wants to redefine citizenship and governance in tech-consumerist terms. It has gained momentum in recent years, as high-profile Silicon Valley figures, like PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, put their money behind startup city initiatives.
Some governments have been drawn to the idea, too, hoping it will attract foreign investment and spur economic growth. In 2013, Honduras passed a law allowing people like Brimen to set up semi-autonomous, privately run cities, "zonas de empleo y desarrollo económico" (zones for employment and economic development), or "ZEDEs" — pronounced "zeh-dehs." These cities are to be governed by private investors, who can write their own laws and regulations, design their own court systems, and operate their own police forces. The Honduran government granted Próspera ZEDE status in late 2017. Subject to limited government oversight and few legal restrictions, a set of for-profit firms incorporated abroad by Brimen and his business partners will govern the city — with ambitions to expand across [its Honduran island] Roatán and onto the Honduran mainland.... This year, skeptical Hondurans organized weeks of anti-ZEDE protests across the country. They fear cities like Próspera will leave ordinary people no better off than they were before, while ceding to profit-driven investors the power to decide what's in the public interest...
Applications for [Próspera] residency require a background check, a Honduran residency permit, and an annual fee — $260 per year for Hondurans and $1,300 for foreigners. Prospective residents will also have to sign something called an "agreement of coexistence," which lays out all the rights and responsibilities of Próspera residents and Próspera's obligations to them. Brimen characterized it as, "if you could make the social contract a real contract." The agreement incorporates Próspera's resident bill of rights, which is modeled on the U.S. Bill of Rights but with some decidedly libertarian twists. Government services will be centralized and automated through ePróspera, an online portal modeled on the much-praised e-Estonia system developed by the Baltic nation. From the comfort of their homes, Prósperans will be able to pay taxes, incorporate a company, transact business, and even buy real estate. They'll be able to vote, too, but their franchise is limited. Residents elect only five of the council's nine members. Landowners vote for two of the five, with voting power pegged to acreage. Buy more land, buy more votes. Próspera's founders choose the four remaining council members, and a six-member supermajority is needed to alter policy.... Government services will be provided entirely by a contractor...
Effective tax rates will sit in the low single digits, and, in place of Honduran courts, there's a private arbitration center. But where the business inducements enter unprecedented terrain is health and safety regulation. Próspera won't impose rules so much as curate prix fixe and à la carte menus of rules. Companies will be able to opt into an existing regulatory regime — choosing from dozens of countries and U.S. states — or they can Frankenstein together an entirely novel code, mixing and matching rules from different jurisdictions and even inventing new ones. [The building code for one new construction site is a pastiche of Honduran and U.S. law.] The lone requirements: sign-off by Próspera's governing council and a liability insurance policy, most likely underwritten, [Próspera co-founder] Delgado says, by offshore insurers.
RestOfWorld carefully chronicles how Próspera became unpopular with locals. In the summer of 2019, Próspera connected a nearby village to its own water supply. Then started billing them. (Though the water bills eventually stopped.) After protests over the fact that few construction jobs went to villagers — and how Próspera's armed security guards began asking pedestrians for identification — several local groups issued a critical statement while villagers elected a new council empowered to speak for them.
It all came to a head when the council asked Brimen to cancel a public meeting (due to surging Covid cases), which Brimen insisted was a violation of his free speech. He held the meeting anyways, local police were sent to break it up, and one of Brimen's bodyguards "scuffled" with one of the officers as his other bodyguards whisked him to safety. The incident made the local news and social media. Then the next month "Próspera Foundation" threatened to cut off the village's water within 30 days if they didn't formally request the foundation's intervention in writing.
The village instead appealed to a local congressman/mayoral candidate, who by mid-January had fully restored the village's water supply.
Vote according to land area? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sort of like the ad-hoc system in America where people in cities have relatively less voting power than those with lots of land.
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That doesn't work because cities are much more politically homogeneous. In America, there are urban districts that vote more than 90% Democratic. There are no districts where Republican voters are anywhere near that concentrated. Even in places like rural Utah, they are only about 70%.
So the Democrats run up the score by huge margins in the cities while losing vast swaths of the countryside by slimmer margins. Of course, when you add partisan Gerrymandering on top of the natural trend, the outcome is ev
Re:Vote according to land area? (Score:4, Insightful)
So perhaps a two-party dichotomy is not a great setup.
Re:Vote according to land area? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vote according to land area? (Score:5, Informative)
Canada (and the UK) is first pass the post and currently has 4 main parties (plus 2 Greens) in Parliament. While it is true that 2 parties always have won, sometimes they need the support of other parties to govern.
And that's the problem with FPTP. The support of the other parties who never win is ultimately what causes FPTP to tend to a 2 party system. That is its stable form. Give it another 40 years and there won't be 4 main parties left.
Of course you can go the other way too. The Netherlands with their Party List Proportional Representation is currently under caretaker government because the 13 parties which were elected 208 days ago still haven't agreed on how to form a cabinet.
And it could do nothing at all like Australia with their instant run-off voting ultimately still resulting in a 2 party system despite none of this "throw away your vote" problem.
Re:Vote according to land area? (Score:5, Informative)
What on Earth are you talking about? Try browsing around dark red rural Texas [nytimes.com]. Tons of counties around ~90% Trump. Just browsing around, Garfield County, Montana is 94% Trump. I can't (just browsing around) find a Biden county that high (even DC is only 92% Biden; counties in the San Francisco area went 72-85% Biden). Lots of precincts however went 100% in either direction.
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That doesn't work because cities are much more politically homogeneous. In America, there are urban districts that vote more than 90% Democratic.
??? You're saying that voting results should not reflect the political make-up of places?
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That doesn't work because cities are much more politically homogeneous. In America, there are urban districts that vote more than 90% Democratic.
??? You're saying that voting results should not reflect the political make-up of places?
It's the ultimate free pass for the folks who lose. And we've already seen the minority rule effect in recent years, via the loser of the popular vote winning via a weird system that does not reflect the will of the people.
Even moreso, the idea that the losers in the rural areas don't want to dictate to the majority is pretty laughable. Given their refusal to even accept their loss at all, their desire to alter the voting landscape in order to prevent their "enemy" voting, Their attempt to nullify a legi
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The reason for this is mostly due to gerymandering.
If you are a republican, what you want to do is have a minority of districts that are as near 100% democrat as you can get. Then a majority of districts that are 49% democrat. Then you can get a majority with just over 25% of the popular vote.
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I offer the case of Austin, Texas.
Austin is the most liberal part of Texas and is strongly Democratic.
However, Gerrymandering has divided Austin into seven pie shaped slices which extend out to the ignorant rural Republican parts of Texas.
The result is that Austin has seven Republican representatives!
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Re:Vote according to land area? (Score:5, Interesting)
In any case, there's already an upper chamber in the national and most state governments that magnifies the voice of less populated areas to provide equal representation based on land. It's bullshit that that's not enough and rural people need to have an outsized voice at every single level from being able to vote easier to the bodies where it's supposed to be one person one vote. It's also bullshit to believe people in rural areas aren't just as diverse as those in the cities. In both these areas, there's sizeable minorities who do not want the policies the rest want. They're not representing the interests of rural areas, they're just representing the personal policy preferences of the majority of people in opposition to the minority in their own areas, not just far off cities. So there's another reason one person one vote should be the rule in the House and state lower chambers.
Re:Vote according to land area? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are significant practical realities faced by people in rural areas that are *different* than those faced in urban areas, and they have a meaningful impact on what kinds of laws make sense.
Like, people who live in cities generally don't have to worry about encountering mountain lions or other dangerous animals in their back yards. They don't *need* to own rifles to defend against such threats, whereas many people who live out in the country absolutely do. Such differences really change what makes sense for personal firearm ownership regulation, safe storage laws and so on.
That was just the first off the top of my head example, but the point should be clear. Someone who does not and has never lived in a city is not well-positioned to decide what laws should govern city-dwellers, and someone who does not and has never lived out in the country is equally ill-positioned to decide or even understand what laws should govern people who live there.
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Like, people who live in cities generally don't have to worry about encountering mountain lions or other dangerous animals in their back yards
The Los Angeles area would like to remind you that it exists, and has a significant mountain lion population.
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No, that doesn't make sense. Cities have significantly more people in them than rural areas, and as such a geographically blind method of voting and governance would put rural areas under the jurisdiction of laws that only make sense in cities.
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Re:Vote according to land area? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes it does but those 2 million people almost always want to dictate policy to the 200 whereas the 200 want minimum universal policy and the freedom to set local policy
Heh. You almost had me there!
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Re:Vote according to land area? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is nothing arbitrary about them. They we've divided up authority in the US so that individual freedom can be more greatly infringed by societal need as you get smaller in scale. Different places have different cultures, different local conditions and pressures, and in general different needs and this system permits maximum flexibility to account for that while still guaranteeing (or supposed to be guaranteeing) freedom of movement to allow those who fall through the cracks or radically differ from the local norms to have a maximum chance of finding somewhere that is a better fit for them or even permitting them to band together and incorporate just such a place.
Even if you disagree and think there is a better scheme you can't credibly claim there is 'less than no reason' in that reasoning.
Re:Vote according to land area? (Score:5, Informative)
Said every regime which has killed millions of people in the last hundred years. If the needs of the many outweigh those of the few then everyone can be designed the few a few thousand at a time and the ends always justify the means.
Also direct democracy has been tried, it self-destructs just as surely as anarchy. Turns out the real world is complicated and grey while almost all people have lives and lack the persistent focus over time to resist people who are selling the great sounding idealistic solutions which always keep popping back up no matter how many times they fail.
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Yup, every city should have the same voting power regardless of resident land ownership.
IOW people in large cities are worth less as people than rural residents. Land == humanity.
That's the core of democracy: dehumanise those you dislike and prevent them voting as much.
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"Every city should have the same voting power" means that individuals in smaller cities have more voting power than individuals in larger cities. It explicitly stands against "one person, one vote".
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Yes, I am bitter.
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Let me get this straight, you are blaming 3 house reps (each of those states you mention only gets 1 single house rep) and the 6 senators for your taxation problems? That's kind of silly. Maybe if you wanted to blame Florida and Texas for blocking that, I would agree.
And really, DC residents should just be treated as residents of Maryland. You have the Potomac River as a natural border to the southwest and the rest of DC is bordered by Maryland.
Seems to me you are just a city that's in Maryland. Yes, it's t
Re:Vote according to land area? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sort of like the ad-hoc system in America where people in cities have relatively less voting power than those with lots of land.
"Those with lots of land" agreed to join the union because of a system that would dilute the power of large population centers to just run everything unilaterally.
We wouldn't even have a United States with your line of thinking.
Re: Vote according to land area? (Score:2)
Re:Vote according to land area? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sort of like the ad-hoc system in America where people in cities have relatively less voting power than those with lots of land.
It was set up that way intentionally so the coastal states don't steamroll the entire nation.
Remember, it's the United States of America. Not the United State of San Francisco, LA, New York, and Fuck Everybody Else.
They didn't go far enough, in my opinion. California basically runs the show, and it's 3000 miles away from my state and completely different in every possible way.
Re:Vote according to land area? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wasn't every state coastal when it was set up?
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Re:Vote according to land area? (Score:5, Informative)
First off, you are talking about a single election every four years, the presidential election. What you seem to be ignorant of is why the presidential election is the way it is and that is probably because you failed failed civics in high school, you didn't pay attention in class, forgot because you couldn't be bothered to understand your own country, or your teachers failed your miserably. One of the first things you need to remember is that until 1860s, the United States were much more like the EU than it is today with the individual states being more like countries.
The voice of the people is the House of Representatives. This is where your vote counts the most because you are voting on someone in your local area. This is how the framers of the Constitution intended it.
The voice of the individual state governments is supposed to be the Senate. Originally, senators were appointed by the state legislatures which were elected by the people. This allowed the senators to act in the best interests of the state as a whole instead of being beholden to people and put a check on the power of the people, provided a way to prevent the people from doing something stupid, and made them independent of the people for things like impeachment. This was changed by the 17th Amendment which changed senators to be directly elected by the people of a state. This is NOT how the framers intended and made the senators subject to the whims of their constituents and we saw how that worked out in the impeachments.
The president is supposed to represent the will of the people, the will of the states, and the will of the nation. The way the president is elected is that the people of a state votes to determine who the state will back for president. The states then get together, in the form of the electors, to vote for president. The number of electors is based on the population, just like the number of representatives per state in the House. The winner of the presidency isn't the person who appeals to the most people in the nation. The winner is the person who appeals to the most people in the most states This results in several things. First, it means that it increases the power of an individual's vote for president by putting each vote into a smaller pool. Secondly, it prevents the most populous states from controlling the presidency. Remember, the states are supposed to much more independent than they are today. This was to protect new states and agricultural states who helped feed the more populous industrial states. Thirdly, it prevents the most populous cities from controlling who is president. If the presidency was controlled by the most populous cities, then the president would sign any legislation that would make those cities happy even at the expense of the rest of the country. Now, you may think that is a great idea, but remember all the food for the major cities comes from rural areas and those states where people own lots of land. Those rural people could simply decide not to feed your city and in a week your city will descend into anarchy as people start to starve. The whole idea behind the electoral college is to prevent voters in entire states from being disenfranchised because of a few populous states or cities
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Because of gerrymandering, votes for a representative are often the least relevant (about 20% of Congressional seats are competitive).
Re:Vote according to land area? (Score:5, Insightful)
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it prevents the most populous cities from controlling who is president.
Yes we agree: city folk are a uniform mass of non humanity so they must count for less.
Also, you're amazingly wrong about, well, everything.
Thing is in practice if you're a Dakotan, your vote counts for fuck all. The Dakotas are so red, that no president every needs to bother considering their opinion. The states will go red either way.
If you had one person one vote without all sorts of weird quantisation to prevent that then the preside
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The whole idea behind the electoral college is to prevent voters in entire states from being disenfranchised because of a few populous states or cities
For example, the above leaves out the important context of why states were concerned about such an outcome. Specifically that the populous north might pass laws to ban, limit, or otherwise curtail chattel slavery as practiced in the south. Sure, their might have been other issues over which they were concerned, but reasons 1 through 600,00
Fordlândia v2 (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Fordlândia v2 (Score:2)
so a fight over water... (Score:2)
I suspect this is a harbinger of things to come... a fight over clean drinking water.
Water
Internet (Network and knowledge access)
Electricity
Re:so a fight over water... (Score:5, Insightful)
But this wasn't libertarian. Peter Thiel and friends don't know what that means. Instead they embrace a progressives political cartoon caricature of libertarianism which stresses control by the wealthy rather than individual liberty.
Re:so a fight over water... (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead they embrace a progressives political cartoon caricature of libertarianism
Us progressives don't have to caricature anything. That's what libertarianism is to many people, especially those who bought into Ayn Rand's feverwetdream.
Re:so a fight over water... (Score:5, Interesting)
That is what it is to a small set of wealthy people who've hijacked the ideology. Just like D's socialist platform is the hangout of the majority of billionaires because they want to keep and grow the count of cheaply bought ultra-poor with gross economic disparity, minimal opportunity for class movement, and utilize a cyclic system of impoverishment and dependency. You find also find a comparable set of exploitative con-men on the Republican side.
In all cases these are a tiny set of overplayed wealthy leeches exploiting the masses. Libertarianism is about individual liberty because it allows for personal freedom and heads off higher ideals that can be used to convince people to do horrific things like genocide and torture for the 'social good' or "god's will." The vast majority of D's are desperate poor people drawn by the light like moths to the hamster wheel and the privileged children of first/second generation entrants to the upper middle class. They might be misguided from having grown up with money without having to claw it from competition or understand why it is so much more important to provide opportunity than a safety net but they do mean well. As for the Republicans who aren't the con-men mentioned above. They are virtually all of the first and second generation out of poverty.
Re:so a fight over water... (Score:4, Insightful)
That is the only kind that exists IRL.
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But this wasn't libertarian. Peter Thiel and friends don't know what that means. Instead they embrace a progressives political cartoon caricature of libertarianism which stresses control by the wealthy rather than individual liberty.
Looks more like Communism. And I mean the textbook Communism, not actual Communism, but only because the founders don't have guns.
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but only because the founders don't have guns
From the summary:
These cities are to be governed by private investors, who can write their own laws and regulations, design their own court systems, and operate their own police forces.
If you have your own private army, isn't that just as good as having guns?
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Some of us would argue that libertarianism ultimately ends up that way. If most matters are solved by civil means rather than legislative or regulatory means, you guessed it, the guy with the best lawyer wins
If you have a problem, if no one else can help... (Score:3)
But seriously, the article says that this libertarian start-up city was "supposed to be a paradise", implying that it's not. And that's the more interesting question: never mind water rights and attempts to expand, how is this city actually doing? Are people signing up and moving in? Are the single-digit taxes sufficient? How is the quality of living? How are those weird health & safety rules actually working out? Does the city do a good job of maintaining order and dispensing justice outside of the Honduras legal system?
Re:If you have a problem, if no one else can help. (Score:5, Informative)
They only started construction of buildings this year. They seem to be at the marketing stage.
It is only 58 acres.
They apparently do have an apartment building constructed. But it may only be some employees and the security living there so far.
The wikipedia page has a lot of "will be."
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Sounds like a typical despotic hellhole to me [nacla.org]
Failed libertarian experiments:
Von Ormy
Grafton
Colorado Springs
Galt's Gulch
Republic of Minerva
Vanuatu
Chile under Augusto Pinochet
Prospera
It's almost as if Libertarianism attracts selfish assholes, and being selfish assholes make a terrible foundation for a civilized society...
=Smidge=
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I don't know if libertarianism attracts selfish arseholes, but people like that do seem to be overconfident in fields they have no experience in. "I started a successful business and I am seriously rich, so I mu
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As a general rule, the fewer people you have to please, the more corrupt you are. City councils still have to get themselves voted in and thus need to keep a significant chunk of the population happy. Corporate boards on the other hand only have to keep rich people who potentially live far away happy, thus tend t
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While I'm a big fan of Musk's companies, what works with tech doesn't necessarily work with humans. Musk's strategy to success has usually been "fail quickly". Design things so that you expect and budget for failures, and don't let the risk of failures hold back your tech development, that failures are only bad when they can kill humans but otherwise they're a learning experience.
But that's not exactly the sort of strategy you want to have in governance...
Musk's view on Mars colonization is very strongly, "
fail slow enough, and have you really failed? (Score:2)
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Aka, until you actually send people there, it's okay for rockets to explode, it's okay for there to be accidents in a (robotic-assembled) base or propellant plant, etc. You only need to have things right when you send humans. Until then, the pursuit of perfection is not only a hindrance, but harmful. You find the "unknown unknowns" by doing, not testing. It's critical to rack up flight hours / operational ho
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So if he got his mars colony going, it would probably be a boon for investors and markets on earth, and great for overseers on mars.
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Speak for yourself. I can't wait to get mine and put it to work.
It's eminently more practical than the Rivian R1T and its microbed.
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Sounds like a typical despotic hellhole to me [nacla.org]
Failed libertarian experiments:
You forgot Jonestown
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I doubt it. There is nothing libertarian about a dictatorship and it sounds like this is rigged to leave the founders in dictatorial control. An authoritarian level of power vested in the state isn't libertarian, libertarian would a weak state just strong enough to have all the elements checking and stymying each other and peers stymying enforcement against their neighbors. The only time personal freedom shou
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how is this city actually doing?
Quote from the actual article: "There are plans to log real estate transactions on a blockchain ledger."
Do you need to know more?
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Ocean (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no land left, the only way to pull this off is in the ocean in international waters. And then too you need a military force to defend your ship since it will be a target for piracy without the protection of any nation. Oh, and if you fight off any pirates, their governments might come for you because you harmed one of their citizens.
Yup, if you want a paradise of any kind .. libertarian, communist, socialist, islamic sharia, or whatever .. you need to be able to protect and defend it. That's the whole reason governments are instituted among people -- to provide guards for their security. So all the libertarian BS about a new country is crap until their plan includes an army.
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Re:Ocean (Score:4, Insightful)
Or, of course, replacing the ones that would jail or kill you with your own staff.
In corporate terms, a hostile takeover.
In political terms, a coup d'etat.
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There is no land left, the only way to pull this off is in the ocean in international waters. And then too you need a military force to defend your ship since it will be a target for piracy without the protection of any nation. Oh, and if you fight off any pirates, their governments might come for you because you harmed one of their citizens.
Yup, if you want a paradise of any kind .. libertarian, communist, socialist, islamic sharia, or whatever .. you need to be able to protect and defend it. That's the whole reason governments are instituted among people -- to provide guards for their security. So all the libertarian BS about a new country is crap until their plan includes an army.
And to further your point, The Satoshi [slashdot.org]. The libertarian ideal fared so well when confronted by the realities of the oceans.
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> Our National Guard IS our nations defense inside our borders, both air and land.
WAS. It's been nationalized to nullify State sovereignty.
The Constitutionally-sovereign states will require a new defense force. NG has been bought with DoD "benefits". A very cheap way to steal power, especially with fiat deficit spending.
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Not sure where you got the idea that there is "no land left". In the US and Canada alone vast swathes of the land has not a single inhabitant. Not to mention all the islands in the Pacific that are either uninhabited or will be uninhabited in the next 100 years (Pitcairn Islands, for example). Globally, 95% of world's population is concentrated on 10% of world's land surface.
Source: https://qr.ae/pGeiG0 [qr.ae]
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I wonder why. (Score:5, Insightful)
Government services will be centralized and automated
What? Libertarians keep telling me that all services should be privatized and based on an individual contract basis.
They'll be able to vote, too, but their franchise is limited.
So liberty.
Landowners vote for two of the five, with voting power pegged to acreage.
Wow, so fair. Rich people get more votes. Colour me surprised. That won't get abused at all.
Government services will be provided entirely by a contractor.
But why? Shouldn't THEFREEMARKET decide what services are needed by having individuals pay for them themselves?
in place of Honduran courts, there's a private arbitration center.
Yeah... I'll trust a system which overtly gives more power to people with more money to fairly arbitrate in private. Sure, modern Western governments aren't perfect when it comes to that, but THIS system doesn't even try to hide it.
Companies will be able to opt into an existing regulatory regime
Will they be able to opt in to a system that allows collusion and price fixing and monopolies with no safeguards? Dumbasses.
by offshore insurers.
Offshore insurers which relies on their non-libertarian government to keep society stable enough. It's as if you know that your ideal world isn't self sustaining (because it doesn't work), so you have to pretend to work, while offshoring the bits that do work. This is the Theranos of countries.
I thought I'd never read something that makes Libertarians sound even more fucking stupid, but goddamn.
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No; generally, the larger the ruling class the better.
At the extreme end you have everybody in the ruling class but this never lasts for too long after a majority eventually fucks it up and hands power over to a minority which only has to sucker a majority (including themselves, so actually, a large minority of suckers to empower a likely smaller minority.) I bet there would be some interesting math models of this behavior...
You mean a *happy* tale. (Score:4, Funny)
It made me grin. So clearly it's a happy tale. :)
And once again, we can only repeat: Everybody gangsta till the Amazon death squad shows up -- Ayn Rand [youtube.com] ;)
. . .
Libertarian vs anarchist (Score:2, Interesting)
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How exactly is that "libertarian"? The bare minimum of functions of state according to libertarianism is "police, courts, military", and most libertarians (non-radical ones) also accept that it should be involved in infrastructure (roads, etc), and possibly certain other things. Yet, here we read: "These cities are to be governed by private investors, who can write their own laws and regulations, design their own court systems, and operate their own police forces". That's not libertarianism, that's some flavour of anarchosomething, possibly anarchosyndycalism or anarchocorporatism or whatever, I don't drink enough of leftist kool-aid to know exactly what.
But I guess since it's a fail story it's more convenient to say it's libertarianism, if it succeeded you'd be all too happy to report "a happy tale of silicon-valley-funded anarchist startup city", eh?
I don't understand the criticism, voluntary, rules based, formalized in contracts governance seem libertarian to me, anarcho-something would literally entail "without rule" which doesn't seem to be the case at all. Too me the opt-in/out would be the defining characteristic (but admittedly I'm not well versed in libertarianism). If I was to describe this as something other than libertarian it would be feudal.
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I don't drink enough of leftist kool-aid to know exactly what.
Libertarianism is orthogonal to the traditional left-right dichotomy, you can find libertarians anywhere on that axis. It's more useful to see the political compass as two dimensional, with libertarian vs authoritarian on a north-south axis and left-right as the east-west axis.
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Anarchists have 2 main spectrums resulting in a 2D space; a plane. Economic Anarchism is pretty much Libertarianism but on the vertical axis personal freedom is on the Anarchist side of middle, down to the point where they adopt the label of Anarchist instead; being in the bottom right corner. The extreme left Anarchist would have zero economic freedom like a serf but lawless in every other way. The absolute extreme positions are all unsustainable; but within the 4th quadrant the left and upper extremes are
worst of both worlds ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Two similar concept spring to mind...
The first is what were called "Company Towns" or "Mill towns"in Canada (and elsewhere) , "closed communities owned and administered by the industrial employer," with homes, stores and even the church owned by the forms. Worked OK as long as the owner/employer held economic leverage over the community and government while providing adequate benefits to both. See https://www.thecanadianencyclo... [thecanadia...lopedia.ca]. Employer had to remain profitable for success, dooming all resource based towns eventually.
The second is very reminiscent of China's foray into Capitalism; works well as long as the Capitalists don't get too greedy /profitable/leveraged and provide adequate benefits to the community and the government and don't challenge the gov'ts overall control.
"There is no general closed-form solution to the three-body problem" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem).
History and current events suggest this is a decidedly tricky balance, one hardly compatible with the Libertarian philosophy.
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In other words, it's just like Communism: It works when people prefer working to making money.
How to undo centuries of progress (Score:5, Interesting)
It took a great deal of effort for Britain to achieve universal suffrage. Before that, only landowners could vote. This proposal appears to want to go back to the bad old days: deliberately creating rotten boroughs.
The idea seems to be to create technology-based mini-states, independent of the nation within which they are embedded, with their own rule of law and economy. It is unlikely that such a state could be self-sufficient. It would still need to trade with the host nation. I can think of closed communities that are largely self sufficient, such as the Amish, but they are the opposite of technology-based, and largely agricultural. If this mini-state is dependent on the host nation in order to survive, they will have to live by the host nation's rules. The "laws" of the mini-state would then have the same status as religious laws, such as Sharia law for Muslims. There could be courts, but real national laws would trump any new laws made up by the mini-state.
A worse circumstance is that the mini-states become richer and more powerful, and then they are like the fiefdoms long ago, living off the toil of the peasants, or parasitic on the host nation.
A complete contrast to this is the kind of community built as ideal villages or ideal towns. I am thinking of Bournville in Birmingham UK, built by the Quaker Cadbury family. That never claimed to be independent of the host nation, and obviously was subject to the laws of England. Another example is Saltaire, near Bradford, built for the workers at the textile factory owned by Sir Titus Salt. It is now a World Heritage site. These places were neither communist nor libertarian in spirit. They were (and still are) good places to live.
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It kind of sickens me that Rowntrees is owned by Nestle now. So very, very much not what Rowntree was about.
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It kind of sickens me that Rowntrees is owned by Nestle now. So very, very much not what Rowntree was about.
We still have the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF). They specialise in campaigning about poverty. JRF have been in the news recently, saying that removing the £20 uplift on Universal Credit (UC) will drive thousands of people into poverty. I am inclined to agree with JRF. In my opinion, the level of UC was probably inadequate in the first place. A lot of in-work UC payments would not be needed, if only employers did not pay such inadequate wages for certain jobs. So this is not just down to the Chance
The publisher is Eric Schmidt's daughter (Score:2, Informative)
https://restofworld.org/about/ [restofworld.org]
Founder and CEO is Eric Schmidt's daughter. You know, as in Google.
The staff is all ex-Wapo/NYT crowd. It's about as non-partisan as CNN.
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The solution is simple (Score:2)
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If they have enough money they'll just hire Blackwater.
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Let them build everything and then stage the revolution. Seriously, what will they do when Honduran government says "We've changed our mind?" Take them to arbitration.
Except, they are not legally free to build whatever they want.
1800's Filibuster Adventurism (Score:5, Informative)
It all came to a head when the council asked Brimen to cancel a public meeting (due to surging Covid cases), which Brimen insisted was a violation of his free speech. He held the meeting anyways, local police were sent to break it up, and one of Brimen's bodyguards "scuffled" with one of the officers as his other bodyguards whisked him to safety. The incident made the local news and social media. Then the next month "Próspera Foundation" threatened to cut off the village's water within 30 days if they didn't formally request the foundation's intervention in writing.
This is some William Walker shit, to feel the right to violate local laws in a nation that is not your own just because you think you have enough dollars (or in the past, guns.)
I lived in Honduras, and I know that the current government is screwey as fuck. So it is not surprised that it would allow this insanity to take hold. The government can't provide for its citizens, so it will allow a bunch of wealthy adventurists to establish their own chiefdoms on a foreign land, regardless of how locals feel about it.
This isn't Libertarianism. It's a bunch of 1800's Filibusteros taking advantage of a terrible situation (a broken government unable to provide for its citizens).
I'm all for poor countries attracting foreign investment, but this is just ugly. It's pure imperialism and colonialism. Back in the 1800's, wealthy Southerners funded expeditionary adventures in Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean with the explicit goal to take over nations, carve colonies out of their territories and then bring them into the union as slave-holding states (kinda like what happened with Texas during the Mexican-American war, but far more premeditated, a predecessor of "Lebensraum".
Truly, google William Walker, and what happened in Nicaragua (my country of origin). Wiki link here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_War [wikipedia.org]
Now we have these so-called Libertarians something akin to this, not by the power of the gun, but by the power of the benjamins and a state's legal power vacuum. As corrupt as the current Honduran government is, I don't even think it actually foresaw or even would agree with this insanity.
Imagine the first-world colonial master mentality of being a filthy rich foreigner disobeying a nation's legal orders and push for meetings in the middle of a pandemic, and have their hired gorillas fight the police.
This is what Libertarianism (whatever that happens to mean in the USA) brings to the table. Not a system of responsible sovereign citizens, but a civil ThunderDome where he how has the money dictates who gets access to water, Mortan Joe style.
inevitable outcome with Libertarians ? (Score:2)
Cheaper to try in existing video games (Score:2)
See Grand Theft Auto if you want to taste a Libertarian like existence. Like the real world, it only works if some impossible conditions are met; like respawning...
Almost like (Score:2)
Almost like centrally-planned things - ironic for a so-called libertarian enclave* - are a fucking disaster nearly every time.
*libertarian how far, I wonder? I mean, I get it, "let the free people decide their stuff" but would the ruling power 'allow' the "people" to decide on a Marxist distribution system? I'm an ardent free-marketer but dogmatic bullshit like this always makes me cringe.
Marc Andreessen (Score:2)
"and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen"
Is that all he's known for now?
curious (Score:3)
So...we're covering the failure of a 'libertarian' utopian community, I don't recall seeing anything on slashdot about this laughable exercise?
https://www.opindia.com/2021/0... [opindia.com]
They bought 200 acres of hilariously bad scrub land high up in the Rockies, thought it was farmland, understood nothing about water rights, and thought they'd build their communist BIPOC enclave to seethe with whitey-hate.
The simple reality (Score:2)
Libertarian ideals only work in very low density populations. The more people you have living in a given area the more liberal laws and rules of society need to become to accommodate all the different opinions people have. This has been shown time and time again. The larger a city gets, the more liberal it tends to become out of sheer necessity.