A Libertarian Island Dream in Honduras Is Now an $11B Nightmare

This is fairly typical of third-world countries. Your business only lasts as long as your patron survives politically. The mayor complains that the city-state of Prospera buys power from the local power company. Of course they do. That's the point usually of SEZs: that they bring local industry and they pay for local services. He complains that the revenue from the apartment tower would have paid for a lot if they paid normal fees and were subject to normal permitting but if they were they wouldn't have built there.

These are all fairly typical to any place and mostly intended outcomes. The SEZ approach is usually a mechanism to promote industry in a place that usually won't see it. But local governments are corrupt. About the one reason you can be sure that Prospera isn't malevolent is that they didn't spend some fraction of those billions of dollars in rigging the election so that their guy would continue to be in power.

> His plan called for “Prosperity Zones” where laws and regulations would be “reset” and governmental powers like taxation, eminent domain, and policing would fall to a private corporation that ran the zone.

It's like they read Neuromancer and thought it was an aspirational goal.

The failure of Yarvin's Dark Enlightenment and Network States.

Neofeudalism doesn't work.

Reminds me of how the "Free State Project" ran into "people feed bears and it sucks for everyone". https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-...

I assume Honduras was a country desperate to attract foreign investment?

Special Economic Zones worked very well in many other countries.

It's not hard to understand why - give long term regulatory certainty, with strong protections for the the wannabe capitalists who want to bring things there and promise them stable very low taxes, and they will eventually flock to the place, bring a ton of money and build a lot of things there if you let them, creating a ton of economic activity in the process, minus the huge tax contributions, but still a net economic benefit because of all the surrounding economic activity and employment etc.

But then a place like Honduras reneges on their ZEDE promise, so now you can basically never trust their promises again?

At any moment in future they could make hard turns towards socialism and confiscate, tax away, and regulate to death - anything that you invest there.

So I guess Honduras will have to grow without huge influxes of new FDI or the stimulus effects one can sometimes get from lower regulations and taxes.

Honduras doesn't strike me as the type of place where people with money are excited to invest? I wonder how this will affect it's future attractiveness?

Haven’t listened to much of this yet, but like the podcast a lot in general: https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/248/erick-brimen...

Huh.

Prospera smells a lot more like re-colonisation efforts instead of any kind of libertarian paradise. I especially like how the founders just assumed they'd have access to the groundwater without paying for it. I imagine one of their requirements to set something like that up is for the local government to be terminally corrupt.

At least the sea steading initiative didn't rely on the local government and people being exploited. You had to volunteer to be exploited there.

I was let down by the article, there's very little narrative that I would describe as "nightmarish" (unless you consider longevity/crypto bros hosting a beach party outside their coworking space a nightmare). More just legal and political posturing and dunking on the feasibility of network states. I did enjoy the irony of a libertarian sect going straight to Washington DC to try and push around their host country. Like, yes, there is a reason it's nice to be a citizen of a global hegemon, why are you trying to do your own thing again?

I just don’t feel it is right to call everything that not socialism “libertarian”. .