Tech Execs Are Pushing Trump to Build 'Freedom Cities' Run by Corporations

This shit is the basis for like 12 different dystopian sci-fi novels.

Thomas Picketty predicted this in Le Capital au XXI e siècle / Capital in the 21st Century (2013), as the nearly inevitable outcome of neoliberal economic behaviour, based onvast statistical evidence gathered by governments and expert organisations over more than a century. About the only thing he got wrong was, like even the meteorological experts, underestimating the speed at which climate chaos was going to overwhelm the world's societies and abet the billionaires' takeover.

I really, REALLY recommend that book, if you have the capacity to slog through dense academic prose (in translation, yet!). To make it easier to lift the book, which would otherwise have been maybe 5,000 pages, give or take a couple of complicated graphs, , Picketty put all the footnotes and appendices online. They do reward reading/examining, at least where you want to see the evidence in very fine detail.

Or, get an economics geek to translate for you.

Technofascism, even...

With company store?

Article starts with Honduras, and wtf does that have to do with US, but

the Network Staters want to build them in our national parks.

The key is how much "we" get paid for their privilege, and does it buy the "utlimate tax free sov cit dream"? while residents get to make money from America, and evade American tariffs.

Best part if it fails, everyone leaves, it can be turned into unregulated nuclear waste dump with child hookers.

Hot take: this is not necessarily a bad idea, and worth experimenting with. After all, Disneyland is an existing example of such a setup, and it's arguably better governed than other jurisdictions within Florida. And when Ron DeSantis flexed the state government power to transfer decision making from Disney back to the politicians, it was not an improvement.

I am a "pro-corporate libertarian", I can see why a lot of people wouldn't like this sort of thing, but my response is "If you don't like it, don't move there." They're not proposing to turn existing cities into these.

It seems quite possible that the Network Staters want to build them in our national parks.

That's possible in the sense that it isn't forbidden by the laws of physics, but it's quite a stretch. The federal government owns over a quarter of all the land in the USA - 650 million acres. National parks cover less than one seventh of that land. There's plenty of space to build charter cities without having to use the most unpopular possible places to put them.