Exit

The future evolution of proprietary cities

We live in the era of urbanization.  Currently 54% of the World’s population lives in cities, up from 34% in 1960.  Such urbanization combined with political decentralization has led to the increasing importance of cities.  Cities have been inserting themselves into conversations which earlier only included nation states.

With that in mind I would like to examine the potential growth path of proprietary cities, cities where the land on which the city is built is owned by a single proprietor.  Such cities offer two advantages.  The first is better administration.  Many developing countries are riddled with corruption.  New cities can start with a blank slate in such areas as education and public safety, escaping often dysfunctional government bureaucracies.  The second is institutional change.  Proprietary cities can offer an island where there exists rule of law and property rights protections in countries that sorely need them.

So, why would a country offer a private developer institutional autonomy?  There are a number of reasons.  The private developer could show how increased economic activity would generate more taxes.  The private developer could guarantee the creation of a certain amount of jobs.  The private developer could ensure a certain amount of investment, alleviating the need of the state to build infrastructure.  Perhaps the state realizes territorial change is far easier than country wide institutional change.

Regardless of the reason why proprietary cities are spreading, the fact remains they are spreading.  However, proprietary cities are spreading under different institutional arrangements with their host states.   There are three categories of such arrangements.  First, some are being built as joint ventures with the host state.  Second, other proprietary cities have contractual arrangements with the host state.  Lastly, some host states create a legal framework for the creation of competing proprietary cities.

A public private venture, like King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia, has several advantages.  First, governments typically have deeper pockets than private developers.  This allows greater initial investment.  Second, government involvement in the project could allow for greater institutional autonomy as the city is not entirely private, diminishing potential fears about a corporatist dystopia.  The downside is that greater government involvement means greater government involvement.  This will likely slow down any project with bureaucratic delays, as well as increasing the likelihood of further government intervention in the future.

While I do not expect public private ventures for proprietary cities will go away, they will not be the dominant form of proprietary cities either.  They will likely occupy a middle ground, used by corrupt governments to showcase a big project as well as to hand out favors to politically connected cronies.

Honduras has taken the furthest step in creating a legal framework for the creation of proprietary cities with ZEDEs.  While not proprietary cities, ZEDEs will be run by a technical secretary appointed by a government established committee, they do come close.  The ZEDE law allows for the creation of numerous competing zones.  Different developers can try different strategies to attract residents, the best strategies winning.

If Honduras sees success with the ZEDEs, similar laws will likely multiply throughout Central America.  Successful ZEDEs being copied along with the law.  It is possible other parts of the world, Africa for example, could notice the ZEDEs and copy them.  However, ultimately I am skeptical ZEDE style laws will grow beyond Central America.  Drafting such laws so as not to be corrupted by the political process is extremely difficult and there is no interest group which would push for the passage of such laws.

The most promising long term strategy, but likely the most difficult short term, is proprietary cities having exclusive contracts with their host states.  A city developer could draw up a contract and offer it to several different governments, promising increased tax revenue and the creation of new jobs.  The developer in return would ask for a degree of institutional autonomy to help the city flourish.  The main stumbling block is there does not exist any developer with enough experience or expertise to credibly offer such a contract.

However, as proprietary cities achieve success in other areas, such as Honduras, the skills necessary to create such a contract and credibly offer it will emerge.  Companies investing in ZEDEs and similar autonomous zones will begin to acquire the skills necessary for large scale expansion.  Eventually, private companies will competently be able to offer hundreds of millions to billions of dollar investments in new cities.  Such potential investments will give them strong bargaining power in asking for institutional autonomy.

Proprietary cities are likely to continue to compete with traditional city governments.  The success of proprietary cities will depend on the degree of institutional autonomy they obtain from host countries which in turn will depend on the mechanism by which they are able to exist in the host country.

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The Benedict Option for the underground

The last bit from David Keenan’s piece, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” in the January issue of The Wire:

“We need a new art that is almost sociopathic in its evasion, in its willingness not to be liked; a non-consensual art that refuses to market itself, that negates that old art world and free music chestnut about creating a space where dialogue can take place. At this point we need to shut down dialogue, halt conversation, put down the iPhone. We need a ruthlessly stratified, exclusionary, hermetic, refusenik art, one that takes its form and its content from the precise, awkward, barely translatable contours of the persons making it as opposed to a happy-clappy magpie approach to SoundCloud mixes, YouTube clips and rips of obscure vinyl. These days we are all fans … and music made by fans ends up uninteresting. Or at least unchallenging, and somehow subservient to our fandom. We need critics, too, who aren’t afraid to be unpopular, to be actually critical, and to write for the good of the culture rather than for the validation of their would-be friendship circle.

The future of underground music exists in the margins, in the one-offs. It’s time for lone voices, barely decipherable ones, in fact. The underground has disappeared but somewhere out there solitary cells are forming. Next time around, the revolution will not be liked, retweeted, favourited or followed back. In 2014 the underground is dead. Long live the underground.”

They aren’t underground by any stretch, but I feel like it would be somehow negligent of me not to note that The Band Perry played in the new Congress this afternoon.

Exit and human nature: The case of Llano del Rio

Going out to Llano
Llano del Rio
Try to find utopia
In the stucco grids and the tumbleweeds

You got to love that pear blossom
It’ll kill you just like possum
Have you been to the rock foundations?
Where it’s mostly known just for the speed

—“Llano del Rio,” by Frank Black and the Catholics

Eighty-eight miles down the road to Sin City lies the rubble of a project the goal of which was to abolish sin itself. And every weekend, thousands of casino-bound travelers pass it by with the same attention they might give to an overheated vehicle on the side of the long and desolate highway. A sand-covered enigma with a history known only to the select few who choose to seek it out, the Llano del Rio colony is a testament to the “old, weird America,” as it has been dubbed—the America of messiahs and schmoozers, of apocalyptic pamphlets and fiery stump orations colored at once by both a starry-eyed realism and a pragmatic utopianism. If time is taken to plumb its depths, it is also a fascinating point of study for all those interested in the concept of political exit, and a sobering reminder of the need for any such exit to be grounded in a philosophical anthropology that views man as a fallen creature, bounded by the restrictions of his nature and limited in his pursuits on earth.

*****

In 1913, Job Harriman was a tired and broken man. He was, in that year, the most popular socialist politician in California, to be sure, but a tired and broken man nonetheless. After a long and tumultuous political career that garnered him attention from around the world, Harriman possessed all the fame he would ever need; it was the victory—the inevitable victory prophesied by Marx—that was sorely lacking.

He made his first run for office in California’s 1898 gubernatorial race, as the Socialist Labor Party’s candidate for governor. Then in 1900, he entered the national stage by joining Eugene V. Deb’s presidential bid with the Social Democratic Party as his nominee for Vice President. Finally, in 1911, he ran for mayor of Los Angeles, in one of the most contentious and talked-about mayoral races in America up to that point, losing to incumbent candidate George Alexander by a smaller than usual margin.

And he would have won it, too, if the system hadn’t been rigged by the capitalists. You see, at the turn of the 20th century, the streets of Los Angeles were a bloody battleground in a war between the forces of capital and the forces of labor, with each side constantly trying to outdo the other in a series of covert and overt contests involving bribery, espionage, political machinations, and the occasional  stick of dynamite. Or at least that’s how Harriman saw things. As far as he was concerned, the business establishment had been out to destroy him from the very beginning. That is why he had been tricked into joining the defense team of the McNamara brothers, two of the union workers suspected to be involved in the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times building, and men who seemed clearly innocent, until they mysteriously confessed one day in a whimpering statement that reeked of blackmail. Before this confession of guilt, Harriman was poised to win the election easily, with news outlets across the nation raving about the impending socialist future of Los Angeles. But after the startling admission, fear of radicalism swept over the city and his reputation was so badly damaged that his Progressive challenger was able to narrowly come away with the victory.

This loss was the final straw that pushed Harriman over the line. Electoral politics were a sham, a hoax intended to deceive the masses into accepting the pre-approved choices laid out for them by their industrial masters. In order to truly affect radical change and dismantle the empire of capitalism in America, he had to take matters into his own hands. He had to do the only logical thing left to do—he had to become a capitalist.

No one is entirely sure of when Harriman first got the idea of forming what would come to be called “the most important non-religious utopian colony in Western American history,” but the uniqueness of his plan cannot be stressed enough. Sure, Europe might have its New Lanark or New England its Brook Farm, but these projects were, however revolutionary for their time, still tainted with many of the reactionary assumptions of the Old World. And that is why they had failed. The Western frontier, on the other hand, was the land of new beginnings and self-determination, the land of making things work and “changing history instead of merely interpreting it.”

To many of the utopian socialists of yore, the idea of starting up a community as a joint-stock company with the explicit goal of outcompeting capitalistic communities by offering the promise of a life free from competition would have seemed like a contradiction in terms. But in 1913, that is exactly what Job Harriman did, in a move that would have made any Silicon Valley-ite proud. In October of that year, after scanning various regions of California for a suitable location, he and several associates purchased 9,000 acres of land along Big Rock Creek in Southern California’s Antelope Valley, bringing Llano del Rio (“the plain by the river”) into reality. (more…)

Secession lagniappe

Happy 152nd anniversary of the Battle of Fredericksburg! Here’s a picture I took on the way to the reenactment two years ago:

Screen Shot 2014-12-13 at 1.32.32 PM

Sorry it’s been a while since the last one of these, been busy with other things.

Watch this great interview with Keli’i Akina of the free-market Grassroot Institute, which is surprisingly favorable to a restoration:

Student activists pulled down the U.S. flag at UH-Hilo and raised the Kingdom’s flag

Dampier on Puerto Rican exit

Michael Tomasky says dump the South. (Please oh please Br’er Fox, don’t throw us into the briar patch!) Chris Bray responds at TheDC.

Confederate flag comes down in Pensacola, along with all others the city has been under except the federal one.

Citadel’s Confederate flag places bowl game in peril

Related: the real winner of 2014 — the Klan.

Meanwhile, SPLC writer murdered by thugs

Congressional Black Caucus holds up Pamunkey tribal recognition because of a probably-inoperative part of their tribal law forbidding miscegenation with black people. (A big part of the story of why it’s taken so long is the Pamunkey initially negotiated its treaties with the Crown.)

Of nanobreweries and free staters

National anarchists are for Long Island secession

Defense bill takes away tribal lands

Political art upsets Iowa SJWs

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Adam Gurri on telescopic morality

From Front Porch Republic:

There is one version of the history of modern media that is a story primarily about a drug, developed to make its users feel anger with delightful intensity. Refinement of this drug has made some great leaps in a very short time — it used to be you had to wait until a certain time of day to get it. Then you had to deal with having it mixed in with a lot of filler material. Now you can go straight to the social media site of your choice, where you and your fellow junkies can trade images of victims overlayed with condemning quotes, or infographics which expose injustice in striking bar and pie charts. And now the shared experience of other people’s outrage has become part of the concoction, and it is immeasurably more potent as a result.

Like actual chemically-induced pleasures, in excess this anger is a sickness. It consumes your waking thoughts, and takes your vitality with you when it leaves. When the dose is administered, an extreme form of tunnel vision sets in. You get sucked into a monomaniacal focus on the object of some injustice, far away from you or anyone you know, and are temporarily unable to see anything that is actually a part of your life. You lose sight of vulgar morality, the stuff that really matters, and succumb to the siren song of telescopic morality. You rage at things you cannot control at the expense of time you could be investing improving the state of affairs around you, for your family, your community. The long term effect of mainlining telescopic morality is utter hollowness; ethical triviality.

Secession lagniappe

Starting to dig into the books that someone has very kindly bought me off my Amazon wish list. I’m a couple of chapters into Felix Morley’s only novel, Gumption Island, which is modeled — the map on the inside of the cover is almost identical to — Gibson Island in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, where he lived and wrote. It’s very charming for an allegorical book; I’ll probably post an excerpt here at some point. Also, I’m a few chapters into Eugene McCarraher’s Christian Critics, about which more will be said here, but I first wanted to take note of something he mentions right in the beginning, that Ralph Adams Cram, the architect, was an early proponent of the Benedict Option — as in, 1909:

The manifold evils that canker the civilization of our own time are explicitly those that monasticism is best fitted to cure, and as a matter of fact, has cured again and again in the past Within this era are no powers of regeneration: atheism, secularism, materialism, intellectual pride and defiance of law are ill tools for building anew the ramparts of the City of God. The impulse must come from without, from God, not from the world; even as it came in such varying degrees and different ways through Benedictines, Cluniacs and Jesuits. When the abandoned insolence of man, mad in his pride of life, has dashed itself to the stars and, falling again, crumbles away in [35/36] impotent deliquescence, then perhaps will come the new prophet, son of S. Benedict (though perhaps in a new habit and with an amended rule), who as in 500 and 1000 and 1500, will release the souls of men from their captivity, and strive again to make all things new in Christ.

There have been a number of smart dissents on the Benedict Option recently, from Jonathan Rauch and Samuel Goldman that are worth reading.

Speaking of cultural disengagement, here’s First Things’ new marriage pledge:

To continue with church practices that intertwine government marriage with Christian marriage will implicate the Church in a false definition of marriage.

Therefore, in our roles as Christian ministers, we, the undersigned, commit ourselves to disengaging civil and Christian marriage in the performance of our pastoral duties. We will no longer serve as agents of the state in marriage. We will no longer sign government-provided marriage certificates. We will ask couples to seek civil marriage separately from their church-related vows and blessings.

ACNA’s new archbishop has advised against signing it. He cites Doug Wilson’s commentary. Ephraim Radner responds to some objections here. Schmitz, Reno have more.

Canadian Anglicans discover the medicine wheel. USCCB endorses beatification of Fr. Paul Wattson

*****

Almost funny Alaskan secession satire

Montana’s Confederate history

Food prices and Hawaiian independence

The Office of Hawaiian Affairs broke an open-meetings law. This is getting interesting.

Sherman as counterinsurgent

The new solid south

Texas secessionists say Obama’s immigration executive order should prompt a secession vote

(more…)