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.
