Futurology

The 'Dark Enlightenment' is a popular concept among some of America's technology elite, such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. It thinks democracy is a failure, and should be replaced by right-wing authoritarianism, preferably led by a dictator or monarch. For obvious reasons, it's enjoying an ascendancy.

A key idea in Dark Enlightenment thinking is the establishment of hundreds or even thousands of city-state enclaves, the equal of sovereign nations, that could then outnumber the old countries and predominate in a new world order of governance.

Prospera in Honduras is one of the first attempts at making this dream/nightmare (pick according to your political persuasion) come true. Now that the people behind Dark Enlightenment thinking have their hands on the levers of power in the US, it won't be surprising if there are expanded attempts to set up new libertarian city-states around the world.

It opens with mostly flavour, but it does eventually get into what happened:

Since then, Prospera and Crawfish Rock villagers have battled over ground water, and tense public meetings have boiled over into fistfights between Brimen’s employees and locals, she said. Brimen [the Prospera founder] himself has visited the community to collect signatures in support of the project and offer loans. Another Prospera leader once rolled in with two pickup trucks full of police, which Cardenas [local Garifuna leader] took as a threat.

So, unsurprisingly for a libertarian project, they ran into trouble with managing common natural resources, and unfortunately the cryptobros arriving are incapable of relating to the locals enough to actually negotiate with them.

It goes on to say that a lot of locals have been hired for this thing as well, so it's not all bad, but there's more:

The local government needs to expand its main highway, build a new police station and landfill. But under the legal protections Prospera enjoys as a ZEDE, it pays no taxes to Honduras or Roatan.

“They use our garbage dump, they use our roads, our airports, and they buy their electricity from the local company in Roatan,” McNab [nearby mayor] said. “I don’t think it’s fair.”

That's an obvious glaring problem. No wonder they achieve single digit taxes with other people paying for their infrastructure.

The Honduran president who championed the so-called “special economic zones” legislation that allowed Prospera’s development sits in a US prison, convicted of drug trafficking. His successor has assailed the project as the shady creation of a “narco-regime.” The nation’s highest court has ruled the law underpinning it was unconstitutional.

oops

He’s also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying Washington lawmakers, portraying the project as a bulwark against socialism in Latin America. Dozens wrote letters to the Biden administration, calling for sanctions and an end to US aid if Honduran President Xiomara Castro doesn’t halt her attack on Prospera.

Wow, dozens?

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. Locals would opt-in to create such districts, and districts across state lines could make independent agreements.

Sounds really really bad

They appointed a 21-member body in charge of the ZEDEs, called the Committee for the Adoption of Best Practices (CAMP). It included three close associates of [then-Honduran President] Hernandez as well as libertarian thinkers such as Morton Blackwell from the Republican National Committee, anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist, and Michael Reagan.

This is where the scary music starts

They targeted like-minded business titans and investors, including Peter Thiel, who’s backed similar projects like the Seasteading initiative, which seeks to build floating countries in international waters. In the end, they collected more than $120 million in startup funds.

Wow this whole thing is really shaping up to be everything wrong possible.

Companies operating in any of 10 regulated industries in Prospera —including healthcare and medical service providers — could pick a regulatory framework from a list of 36 countries that best suits their needs. Registrants could even write their own industry regulations and submit them for approval. All would have to buy liability insurance in lieu of securing permits and licenses.

Seriously, is this a joke?

Instead of imposing top-down regulations, he said, the Prospera model relies on the market to decide how risky any particular business practice is and regulate itself.

Ah, The Market. Yes.

Well, it's clearly the griftaculous republiQans-who-don't-want-to-be-called-republiQans and their techbro messiahs playing incompetent god and making every expected mistake along the way. It's not like any of this is new.