Prospectus On Próspera | Hacker News Reader

Prospectus On Próspera

astralcodexten.substack.com

32 pointsfeross7 comments

Having the "lowest taxes in the world" is the most significant thing about this. It means this is just a disguised tax haven. If it's "successful", it'll be because a bunch of rich people moved there. The same way Luxembourg is "successful". Reducing the taxable wealth available for infrastructure and welfare programs in real countries.

I hope this succeeds and grows large enough that we can see the serious effects of some of these experiments. Medical reciprocity and pick your own regulatory framework are such very, very interesting ideas and I want to see what happens when they are applied to millions of people

Some highlights from the article:

10% income tax rate, which probably makes it a tax haven (the article goes into some detail on this)

It's a very direct test of the whole "can a government turn a profit by incentivizing people to move there", since the government is a company

Unsurprisingly, highly Libertarian

The stability of the Zone relies, to an extent, on a treaty between Honduras and Kuwait

Businesses can choose the municipal codes they follow, from any number of options. A doctor can choose to use Norwegian medical regulations. A landlord could choose to be governed by the codes in San Francisco, or Atlanta, or Indianapolis.

Somehow, despite the above, the government provides you with an app to configure your house.

Property rights work like minecraft, you purchase the right to blocks of 1 meter cubes. Supposedly this solves the issue of obstructing someone's view.

Overall, this was a fun read, I'm skeptical though, and I think Alexander is too.

> Property rights work like minecraft, you purchase the right to blocks of 1 meter cubes. Supposedly this solves the issue of obstructing someone's view.

How would this work in practice? If someone buys the rights to all second floor voxels, will they be able to veto any apartment construction plans? Someone else may own third floor through 100th floor voxels, but unless they find a way to build a hovering skyscraper, they cannot build it without the consent of the second floor voxel owner.

Yeah, if you own the air space no one can build there without your permission, that's basically the point. It allows people who want to protect their ocean views to do it in a way that doesn't require spending years pushing silly environmental impact studies.

The thing is that, owning an airspace has no value unless you own all the air and ground space under it. To prevent a construction, you won't have to spend ludicrous amounts of money to buy all the air space, just a small amount to buy one level's worth. NIMBYs can continue NYMBYing.

It seems like, initially at least, you are buying the land and air from HPI, and they don't have to sell you it at all if they think it is an area that ought to be developed

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