So the free cities conference in Honduras that I attended last year is now bearing fruit.
How genuinely libertarian will these cities be? I await events.
So the free cities conference in Honduras that I attended last year is now bearing fruit.
How genuinely libertarian will these cities be? I await events.
I hope the project is not going to be using land whose ownership is disputed between the Unified Farmworkers Movement of Aguan and the Corporacion Dinant.
I tried to find more information about this change and the Honduran effort but all I got was a generic business webpage from FCD. Several questions immediately spring to mind:
1) Why did he ditch the seasteading effort to go with a land-based idea, when he had all that funding and backing from Thiel?
2) How are you going to prevent getting involved into armed conflicts almost right off the bat? Drug cartels aside, you have corporations, primitve natives, rogue militias, etc. It’s a catch-22. If they don’t use weapons they’ll just be mowed down and die. But if they use weapons they’ll just be portrayed as “armed insurgents” and taken out that way.
3) How exactly to build a community in a remote jungle without people? You need people to go there to build infrastructure, but you need infrastructure to support people. Another catch-22 which seems only solvable with massive funding.
4) Similar to the previous problem, unless you have a critical mass of people you can’t really test the idea of competing jurisdictions. The reason is simple: 1 person is not a practical example of a jurisdiction. So in practice it will end up being a single jurisdiction run by Patri or somebody else as a “benevolent free market dictator”, not unlike the utopian communities and intentional communities that have mostly failed over the centuries. And aside from the unsavory Pinochet comparison (which will be made over and over in the media given the Latin American setting), a wise benevolent dictator is not really in the spirit of market anarchy in the first place.
All in all I’m unsure if the Hong Kong model can be replicated in a Honduran jungle. If it can it would be nice to hear more about how it’s coming!