from Hacker News

The "charter city" movement in Honduras

by pelle on 10/17/14, 4:50 AM with 20 comments

• by kauffj on 10/17/14, 12:54 PM

  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.

• by kauffj on 10/17/14, 12:49 PM

  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.

• by zcaceres on 10/17/14, 1:11 PM

  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.

• by frozenport on 10/17/14, 7:43 AM

  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.

• by ASneakyFox on 10/17/14, 8:28 AM

  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.

• by anovikov on 10/17/14, 10:39 AM

  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.

• by lotsofmangos on 10/17/14, 12:57 PM

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

• by gph on 10/17/14, 5:15 AM

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