The "charter city" movement in Honduras

http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/10/what-would-it-be-like-to-live-in-a-town-run-by-investors/381532/

by pelle • 12 years ago

35 20 12 years ago

citylab.com

gph• 12 years ago

So we've finally gotten to the point where Snow Crash is going to become a reality. That's fun.

lsiebert• 12 years ago

Strange, I was thinking Detroit in "Robocop".

zo12• 12 years ago

Oh don't mind that, that's your inner biases and preconceptions talking. Some see one thing, others see differently.

frozenport• 12 years ago

It should be noted that Honduras as an extremely limited number of professionals that can make these cities productive. As mentioned they might simply become havens for the hereditary wealthy who have mismanaged the country into oblivion.

ASneakyFox• 12 years ago

I like how they changed the name from autonomous zone to zone of employment and economic development and then it got passed.

I sense it'll end up being a sweatshop farm and the "employees" will be paid so little that they won't be able to leave.

The us used to allow small towns like this. Employees would get paid in company minted currency. Then they'd only be able to shop at stores and restaurants owned by the company. This sort of thing is of course illegal now.

praxeologist• 12 years ago

That's crazy. How did they get the people to go there? Did they trick them somehow?

huxley• 12 years ago

If you worked in a remote area doing logging, mining or fishing, the use of company stores and company scrip was quite common once upon a time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip

Scrip was theoretically exchangeable for cash, but because these company towns tended to be hard currency poor, you'd never get anything close to face value, so you spent it in the stores provided by the company.

Both the wages and prices were set by the company so the worker had little choice but to accept it or find their way back to more populated areas and likely unemployment.

lotsofmangos2• 12 years ago

You load 16 tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St Peter don't you call me cos I can't go, I owe my soul to the company store.

davidw• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store

yardie• 12 years ago

That sort of thing continues with boutique retail clothing. They pay you and then require you to buy this years line.

anovikov• 12 years ago

I was always thinking that Singapore and Hong Kong were total opposites of 'unregulated free market', Singapore is almost a dictatorship and Hong Kong was a British colony under a strong, undemocratic rule. Good geography and lack of 'legacy' issues due to these territories being freshly developed from scratch made them successful, bringing free market with no government pressure to Honduras will bring nothing but more violence and poverty.

logicchains• 12 years ago

Market freedom is not necessarily connected with political freedom. One could for instance have an oppressive leader who instituted free market economic policies, such as Pinochet. A free market doesn't necessarily imply democracy (freedom to choose one's political leader), it only implies freedom of exchange (freedom to buy and sell as one wishes, with only minor taxation being applied).

tormeh• 12 years ago

minor taxation

What do you mean? As long as the tax is low enough to not be a de facto ban, I think it's still a free market.

kauffj3• 12 years ago

The concept is fascinating because it offers a chance to experiment with altering fundamental aspects of society that are otherwise static. What happens when a place exists with no or limited IP? What happens when a place exists with little-to-no restrictions on medicine or transportation? Who knows what we could create?

Larry Page is right when he says we need more opportunities to experiment with society. The fundamental problem with government is a lack of pressure to improve. In Hirschman's conception, it's become all voice, no exit.

It's completely possible this implementation could be shady or mismanged. The fact that Romer has left should be disconcerting. But as an idea it's terrific and we should all be excited.

kauffj3• 12 years ago

Taleb made this comment on Facebook yesterday. Seems relevant:

Another attribute of small is beautiful: (what we call) democracy.

The idea of democracy is to take the citizens’ location as fixed, and the identity of those in government as variable, the “representatives” matching the preferences of the people. But you can get similar results of representation, even under dictatorships, by varying the people’s location instead.

Assuming you are able to move to the canton or municipality where you feel the dictators represent your tastes & beliefs, such competition would put pressure on local municipal dictators to please taxpaying constituents so they stick around. So the smaller the size of political units (and the larger their number), the more democracy we get in the system.

lotsofmangos2• 12 years ago

They might get it done too, as long as the main opponents to the plan, like Antonio Trejo Cabrera, keep being murdered.

zcaceres• 12 years ago

I am interviewed in this article and have been a close observer of the situation in Honduras since 2011. Many of the concerns raised in this piece are legitimate.

However, Paul Romer's involvement and renunciation do not indicate what people think it does. Romer was also behaving badly just as the government has been. It was sort of a mutually-destructive power struggle that, sadly, hurt the people of Honduras most of all by jeopardizing the integrity of the reforms.

Further, the ideological aspects ('free market zones' etc) distract from a more important idea – namely that cities can incubate better policies more safely, cheaply, and effectively than if reforms are tried first at the national level. Think Lean Startup for political reform.

The use of neighborhoods and municipalities as testbeds for reform is politically neutral... and it ought to stay that way, contrary to the wishes of some in this article!

Please consider visiting www.startupcities.org for a practical alternative to the 'charter cities' idea.

kauffj3• 12 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlMwc1c0HRQ

(seriously, why isn't there a mailing list option on the site?)

The "charter city" movement in Honduras

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