S1E2: The Hidden Agenda of Charter Cities

How Silicon Valley Titans Attack Our Democracy

On August 4th 1789 - three weeks after the Storming of the Bastille initiated the French Revolution - members of the nobility and clergy relinquished their long-held privileges in a historic, late-night session at France’s Constituent National Assembly. It meant the abolition of the feudal system, the end of serfdom and peasant obligations like forced labor and tithes (a mandatory contribution of a tenth of one's income or produce, for the sustenance of the clergy), marking it the Night of Sacrifice of the Privileged. Inspired by the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the very National Assembly, passed 17 articles guaranteeing citizen and human rights to every inhabitant across the French Empire from birth on.

Many historians consider these events to be the definitive transition from the medieval to the modern era, yet the neoreactionary movement driven by Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel, Mark Andreessen, Mark Armstrong or Bajai Srivivasan appear to see in a ‘modernized’ form of feudalism the future of governance.

This essay explores the concept of Charter Cities and Network States, detailing their ideological underpinnings and analyzing how they are being leveraged by a self-proclaimed elite to establish autonomous territories, ultimately aiming to dismantle any traditional, democratic governmental oversight to crown themselves Lords, Dukes and Kings of the Information Age.

Sounds absurd? I know. The passing of historic legislation that would undoubtably mean irreversible damage to the U.S. democracy as it is drafted to legalize the groundbreaking ceremony to begin constructing what is ought to become an independent, diplomatically recognized country on U.S. soil appears to be just months away.

Charter One: From a TED Talk to a Charter City Blueprint

Paul Romer, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, proposed in 2009 the concept of Charter Cities as semi-autonomous zones within nations. These cities would be empowered to create their own legal codes, immigration policies, and governance structures, with the goal to foster economic growth and innovation, drawing parallels to examples like Hong Kong or Singapore. This approach would offer a departure from traditional reform, advocating for a clean slate approach to development. To avoid corruption and guarantee investment safety, Romer’s concept involved governmental oversight of such Charter Cities by nations like Canada offering an alternative to traditional Development Aid. Countries open to the idea contacted Romer. After years of debate Honduras passed under president Porfirio Lobo Sosa, a charter city law, from which Romer withdrew his support, saying corporate special interests had corrupted his vision.

While Romer stopped walking through the door he had created by just glimpsing through it’s keyhole, a well-funded Delaware-based company took concrete action and did not only flung the door wide open but walked right through it. Erick A. Brimen, CEO and founder of Próspera, a venture fueled by investments of Tech-Titans such as Brian Armstrong's Coinbase, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen or former Andreessen Horowitz Partner and Coinbase CTO Balaji S. Srinivasan (via Pronomos Capital) recognized this as the moment to realize the blueprint of their most ambitious startup utopia: Establishing what is supposed to grow into an own, by the United Nations recognized nation with everything that comes with it - from courts to taxation. A billion dollar real-world learning experience, necessity to refine their vision to potentially scale such Charter Cities across the US and beyond. This Silicon Valley utopia comes with one big difference to Romer’s initial idea: Their setup has no governmental oversight at all.

If you have S1E1: The Butterfly Revolution: A Silent Coup? many of those names involved, their connections to the neoreactionary movement and Trump administration are familiar to you. This makes the abundance of governmental oversight less surprising, it spurred me to delve deeper though. The revelations that followed were truly mind-blowing:

Próspera finalized a deal with Honduras’ President Juan Orlando Hernández, starting constructing the by far most advanced project within the globally growing Charter City movement on the island of Roatán in 2021. Honduras - or the circles governing it during that time - granted Próspera extensive autonomy, typically reserved for counties, including its own jurisdiction (excluding Honduran criminal law), the right to define their own industry-specific regulations, as well as taxation of which Honduras receives a 12-15% ‘revenue’ share. As a result entry requires signing a Contract of Coexistence exceeding 4,000 pages, while you can become citizen via an app.

Próspera cut this deal even though they could have known what Romer meant with corporate special interest: In 2009 military forces forcibly removed Honduras' left-wing president, Manuel Zelaya, from his residence to install in a military-sanctioned election Porfirio Lobo Sosa, Zelaya's former rival, as president. During his presidency Honduras’ Supreme Court ruled against his Charter City (ZEDE) legislation, citing the risks that it would carry to Honduras as a nation. Hernández, then President of the National Congress, effectively neutralized that opposition by removing four dissenting judges in what was widely condemned as a purge and technical coup. Those coups, drew criticism regarding their legitimacy from various international observers, including the U.S. but have not resulted in any severe consequences, until in 2019 U.S. federal prosecutors accused Hernández (who succeeded his mentor Lobo as president) and Lobo of accepting campaign contributions from the Cartel determining that they had turned Honduras into a narco-state. Lobo's son got already convicted of trafficking tons of cocaine to the U.S. in 2016, while Hernández's brother received a similar conviction and was also implicated in the murder of two rival drug traffickers three years later. President Hernández himself ended up being sentenced to 45 years in a U.S. prison in 2024, Lobo's wife received a 17-year sentence for corruption in the same year.

Skepticism surrounding Próspera understandably steadily intensified from the moment it secured its 50-year concession to manage their part of Roatán in 2013. This simmering tension reached a boiling point when the project released images depicting its advanced stages of development, which encroached upon the neighboring fishing village of Crawfish Rock. The ZEDE laws, designed to facilitate Charter Cities in Honduras, include provisions for expropriation, which allows for the forced sale of land. A New York Times article summarized that circumstance as follows:

[…] the narrative changed from ZEDEs are bad because they are violating constitutional rights, […] to the more forceful ZEDEs are bad because they’re going to take your land. A national protest movement was born […]

This movement was fueled by historic resentment: Facing substantial debt to Britain in the late 19th century, Honduras sought to stimulate its economy by enticing foreign investment through land grants and financial incentives. This led to investments by U.S. banana companies, such as Cuyamel and United Fruit (corporate ancestors of Chiquita), who agreed to constructing vital infrastructure like railroads and ports in exchange for vast tracts of land. In 1911 Cuyamel formed an army of American mercenaries that carried out a coup to install a puppet government turning Honduras into the original Banana Republic.

In 2021, Xiomara Castro, Zelaya's wife, made history by winning the Honduran general election, becoming the country's first female president. That same year, the UN projected that ZEDEs could potentially control approximately 35% of Honduras' territory due to the described provisions for expropriation. Although Próspera publicly stated that using such laws would contradict their ideological understanding of property rights, they stopped short of proposing amendments to the legal framework. One year later in 2022, Honduras’ Congress unanimously repealed the law and passed a constitutional reform that would abolish the until then three existing ZEDEs.

Próspera - technically not a city or country but a Delaware company - decided to make as such use of the powerful investment provisions of the CAFTA-DR free trade agreement and sue Honduras for $10.8bn in a investor-state dispute settlement court located at the World Bank. These dispute settlement systems are structured to grant corporations the right to sue states, a right not reciprocated. This creates an enormous imbalance of power, especially because corporations can claim potential future profits as damages, while the process would be held in a country that controls assets of the country being sued. Refusal to pay is generally not an option, as assets can be seized to enforce judgments. These arbitration outcomes can also add to a state's foreign debt. Studies reveal states win only 36% of arbitration cases.

The geopolitical magazine Foreign Policy concluded as follows:

Próspera’s $10.8 billion claim is equivalent to roughly two-thirds of Honduras’s annual state budget. Such an arbitration decision would simply render the country bankrupt. It is time for the growing number of ISDS critics, including the current U.S. administration [Biden at that time], to go beyond the do as I say, not as I do mantra and support Honduras’s democratic sovereignty in the face of an egregious case of corporate abuse.

Given Próspera's governance structure, its backers as well as Committee and board members it is little surprising that several high ranking U.S. officials joined its cause immediately. House Republicans, including Paul Gosar, Mario Díaz-Balart, Michael Waltz, and Maria Elvira Salazar called publicly for individual sanctions in response to attempts to shut down the ZEDEs while the Senators Bill Hagerty and Ben Cardin sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken stating:

Any direct or indirect expropriation of U.S. investments in Honduran Economic Development and Employment Zones would be regarded as a direct assault on the guarantees of CAFTA-DR and surely trigger a devastating loss of private sector confidence. In turn, this would dramatically undermine the strong U.S. interest in encouraging significant new private sector investment in Honduras and the region. We therefore urge your Department to encourage Honduras to respect this 50-year legal stability guarantee that protects U.S. investments in Honduran Economic Development and Employment Zones under CAFTA-DR.

Próspera's Committee of Best Practice - one of two chambers of its governmental structure - consisted initially according to a New York Times article of members from both European aristocracy and prominent U.S. Republican circles, incl. Archduchess of Austria Gabriela von Habsburg, granddaughter of the final Austrian emperor alongside figures like former Reagan speechwriter Mark Klugmann, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, and Ronald Reagan’s son, Michael Reagan, among several other former Reagan administration members. Klugmann is known to be a driving force of the Network State movement and has been an advocate and advisor to governments around the world regarding Charter Cities, while he considered an expert on their legislation.

While the Best Practice Committee, was officially appointed by former Narcopresident Hernández, Próspera's second chamber is a nine-member council, of which five are elected, while four are appointed by Honduras Próspera Inc. The requirement for a two-thirds majority in decision-making effectively grants Honduras Próspera Inc. veto power. An app-based voting system, where each square foot of land grants one vote, creates a real neofeudal power dynamic, which mirrors historical empires, such as that of Gabriela von Habsburg's ancestors, who held vast landholdings, including the Spanish Empire that stretched across Europe, Asia, South and North America, during an era when land ownership was the foundation of political power.

In light of the overall vision, it's clear that the consequences for Honduras are not perceived as a setback, but can be interpreted as deliberate outcome and a blueprint ready to be scaled across the globe. Even though alarming, it appears to be little surprising that Próspera's Chief of Staff, Trey Goff, revealed to WIRED that he and representatives from the Freedom Cities Coalition have been in recent discussions with the Trump administration, who have reportedly responded positively to their proposal to establish ten Charter Cities on U.S. soil, multiplying Honduras’ Trojan Horse turning it into an existential threat to liberal democracies around the globe.

Notably: the Freedom Cities Coalition is an initiative of NeWay Capital LLC, Próspera's trademark holder.

Charter Two: From Charter City Blueprint to Irreversible Expansion

What I’m really calling for is something like Tech Zionism, he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (spiritual father of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe […]

This report from New Republic is just one of many about a controversial speech of Srinivasan at Y-Combinator - maybe the most prestigious startup hub in the world -where he went on as follows:

A huge win would be a Gray Pride parade with 50,000 Grays. That would start to say: ‘Whose streets? Our streets! Reds should be welcomed there, and people should wear their tribal colors. No Blues should be welcomed there. In addition to celebrating Gray and celebrating Red, you should have movies shown about Blue abuses.… There should be lots of stories about what Blues are doing that is bad. Take total control of your neighborhood. Push out all Blues. Tell them they’re unwelcome. Just as Blues ethnically cleanse me out of San Francisco, like, push out all Blues.

Srinivasan's Blue vs. Grays terminology refers to the uniform colors of the American Civil War, with Grays representing his Network State movement. He argues that there are only three geopolitical strategies left to guide the world, which he sees in somewhat of a death spiral, towards a positive future:

1. Reform the Chinese Communist Party.

2. Turn around the US which is in inexorable decline.

3. Disrupt governments and nations and start something new.

Srinivasan, a crypto billionaire who Tech-Titan and Senior Trump Advisor Marc Andreessen attest to have the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody he has ever met, denies the possibility of a fourth alternative, considering only option number three as feasible to venture out to safe the world. His antipathy with the current state of society echoes that of Musk, Thiel and other Tech-Titans who have publicly abandoned hope in the current democratic system and joined the neoreactionary school of thought which supports neofascist ideals. So it is little surprising that Marc Andreessen, undoubtably one of the most influential Venture Capitalists in the world, names Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, co-author of the 1919 Fascist Manifesto and vivid supporter of Italians dictator Benito Mussolini as one of his patron saints - his guiding spirit.

In their attempt to create an alternative to the liberal democracy as we know it, Thiel and Srinivasan have both extensively discussed late Harvard economist Albert Hirschman’s book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty and underlined their believe and the importance of Exit as a concept that goes beyond the authors interpretation. The book presents two contrasting paths for individuals facing organizational decline: One can either exercise their Exit option by leaving, or can use their Voice to attempt to change and shape the organization's future.

Contrary to Hirschman's framework, which limited Exit and Voice to e.g. business, while to politics only Voice could apply, the neoreactionary movement argues that government is in fact a corporate entity and thus Exit has to be an elementary part of political systems as well. They argue that without the ability to leave, no one really needs to listen to you - in business and politics. Elon Musk, for instance, stated in a CNN interview in 2020:

Government is simply the largest corporation. I think it is a false dichotomy to look as government and industry as separate. Government is simply a corporation in the limit. It is the ultimate corporation - it is a Monopoly.

This argument is echoed in Srinivasan's 2022 book, The Network State, which details how a global network of Charter Cities, modeled on Honduras' best practices, are supposed to form a globally decentralized Network State. Voting, ownership and payment is all handled utilizing Blockchain protocols. He also describes what he calls parallel establishment which in turn creates a parallel society that ultimately, when a threshold is reached, would settle Charter Cities. With parallel establishment he means like-minded - Gray - startups and institutions, while its loyal employees, users and other stakeholders represent the parallel society. When the tipping point - and legislation - to establish Charter Cities is reached, qualifying individuals are offered the choice to relocate to them, which are governed by their preferred Tech-Titan. This Tech-Titan wields veto power over elected officials and establishes laws and regulations with absolute authority, reminiscent of pre-French Revolution monarchies. Exiting existing governance structures for complete subordination in exchange for a tax rate close to zero and the promise to live free from regulation, the local Tech-Titan sees as limiting for innovation and/or personal freedom. All Charter Cities together function as a Network State that aims to be eventually diplomatically recognized.

He outlines a 7-step process for realizing his vision of establishing this global Network State based on a decentralized cluster of Charter Cities tailored to the needs of the Information Age:

1. Found a startup society.

2. Organize it into a group capable of collective action.

3. Build trust offline and a cryptoeconomy online.

4. Crowdfund physical nodes.

5. Digitally connect physical communities.

6. Conduct an on-chain census.

7. Gain diplomatic recognition.

To be clear: This neoreactionary vision involves relocating company headquarters to Charter Cities. Employees, such as those at SpaceX, would be offered the opportunity to move with their jobs, to a city surrounding a space station, enticed by near-zero tax rates and expanded personal freedoms, like legalized drug use, in exchange for relinquishing voting rights. Within these zones, Elon Musk, or other Tech-Titans, would unilaterally determine the city's direction, free from government oversight.If one don’t like that, they are free to Exit, while their Voice won’t be heard though.

Srinivasan suggested on March 5th on X to create The Special Elon Zone (SEZ):

There's a simple way to rebuild manufacturing in the US: just give @elonmusk control of a huge swath of land surrounding Starbase, Texas and allow him to set whatever regulations he wants.

1) First, sunset the regulations. America has talent. What it doesn't have is friendly regulations, particularly in terms of labor and environmental laws. But President Trump and Governor Abbott of Texas can use executive orders to remove obsolete laws at state and federal level. And for anything they can't remove, they can direct state and federal police to exercise discretion in terms of non-enforcement. Think of Starbase as a "sanctuary city", but for innovation — using leftist tactics in reverse.

2) Then, allocate capital. With regulatory barriers down capital will likely flow freely. However, in the unlikely event it doesn't, then you can do government VC. Basically: Democrats gave $370B+ to John Podesta to waste on climate graft, so the precedent is already established. But Elon is a proven capital allocator. So have Treasury back up the truck to make Elon —or his designates — the #1 VC in America. […]

3) Ensure border security. Given the security risks Elon faces, he'll need border control. So you might designate the land surrounding Starbase to be a military base or something similar, so that he can fence it off and determine at his sole discretion who can enter. Similarly, ideally every single person in the zone has opted in to be there, so no one can complain about the pro-builder regulations.

4) Proceed at the speed of physics. Finally, with all man-made barriers removed in the form of regulation and capitalization, Elon and his designates can move at the speed of physics — not permits. […]

5) Nail it, then scale it. Once there's traction, replicate the idea in other states, giving other proven founders their own special economic zones. I'm sure Florida and Ohio would want theirs after Texas proves it out. […]

So the suggestion is really, that Elon Musk moves companies and their jobs, that have been made possible with more than $38bn of tax payer money while utilizing vital U.S. infrastructure, into his own Charter City that he controls without any oversight. While these might seem like mere concepts, the NRx movement's agenda has advanced to the point where these Trojan Horses are poised to be established on U.S. soil within a matter of months, as the following details will demonstrate:

Our favorite possibility is Presidio National Park. Though much smaller than Guantanamo Bay or Lowry Range, its location is ideal. San Francisco is the world’s tech capital, despite its many problems. The federal government can help San Francisco unleash its full potential by developing Presidio. With Paris-level density and six-story apartment buildings, a developed Presidio would add 120,000 residents, increasing San Francisco’s population by 15%. Further, given the city’s existing talent density, a Presidio featuring a liberalized biotechnology regime would quickly become a world innovation leader in this sector. America deserves a Bay Area that can compete; turning Presidio into a Freedom City could be an important step in that direction.

To that result come Mark Lutter, founder and executive director of the Charter Cities Institute, and Nick Allen, president of the Frontier Foundation in an article published on the portal City Journal. They are in corporation with other lobby groups such as the before mentioned Freedom City Coalition involved into drafting the legislation with the Trump administration. A WIRED article reports:

Frontier Foundation, a 501c4 organization, is working in partnership with the nonprofit Charter Cities Institute to bring freedom cities to the US.

Jeffrey Mason, the head of policy at the Charter Cities Institute, tells WIRED that several other groups have recently joined their effort, including the Housing Center at the American Enterprise Institute and the Foundation for American Innovation. They’re drafting legislation that Mason says should be ready “hopefully sometime in the next several months.”

He adds that members of these groups are having “casual conversations with people in the White House,” in addition to Republican and Democratic members of Congress.

In a 2025 memo shared with WIRED, the Frontier Foundation argues that “domestic innovation and production has been significantly impeded for decades by outdated and unnecessarily restrictive federal regulation.”

In parallel to drafting new legislation, Trump moves forward preparing for instance Lutter’s and Allen’s most favorite Charter City target Presidio National Park. The New York Times reports:

President Trump moved to drastically shrink the Presidio Trust, the federal agency that oversees the Presidio of San Francisco, a national park at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge and one of the city’s most cherished public spaces, in an executive order issued Wednesday evening.

The legislative framework remains undefined, yet enthusiastic lobbyist groups, such as Free City Organization, are already presenting their arguments which sound aligned with Srinivasan vision and the Próspera blueprint:

[…]no city can be a Free City unless it has the long-term guarantees and arrangements to be able to then operate independently, without the reliance on continuous federal political support. To be a Free City, the nascent Freedom City should also have as much of a blank-slate regulatory system as possible – likewise with a long-term stability guarantee. To maximize its independence, this city should be privately owned, and if it is established on federal land, this land should be promptly privatized. Their focus will be on flexibility, economic freedom, and voluntary participation.

Such Free Cities allow for organic growth without the need for constant government intervention. By focusing on voluntary association, residents and businesses choose to participate in an environment that prioritizes innovation, efficiency, and accountability. Instead of relying on the mercy of Congress with regard to their freedom and status, such cities would simply operate under a different legal and administrative framework from the start.

Even with the ongoing erosion of Honduran democracy as a stark warning, this situation strongly resembles the precedent established by the Committee of Best Practices.

Charter 3: Dismantling Democracy to Establish a Neofeudal Order

S1E1 has outlined that the way MAGA has been infiltrated appears to be modeled after Curtis Yarvin’s ideas surrounding his essay The Butterfly Revolution this Network State approach sounds suspiciously like his 2008 essay PATCHWORK: A POLITICAL SYSTEM FOR THE 21ST CENTURY where he envisioned:

The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions. If residents don’t like their government, they can and should move. The design is all “exit,” no “voice.”

He goes on to construct Friscorp, his brainchild of the Patchwork - or Charter City - San Francisco will be turned into. Yarvin wouldn’t be Yarvin if he wouldn't address the clear difficulties associated with such a city reincorporation by providing concrete - and pragmatic - solutions:

The first and touchiest problem, though, is just deciding who gets to live in San Francisco. Friscorp’s answer is simple: anyone who isn’t dangerous to others, and can afford to live in San Francisco. It is probably also nice if they speak English, but considering the exigencies of the second constraint, they almost certainly will. Friscorp may also import menial laborers, as Dubai does today, but they are not to be confused with the actual residents.

This concept, mirroring Srinivasan's Y Combinator speech, is already put in motion e.g. by Trump's actions regarding Presidio National Park. Regarding the legislation of Yarvin’s Charter Cities he had already back in 2008 the following ideas:

To be a reactionary is not to say we must reinstall the exact political structure of the fourteenth century tomorrow, although that would surely be an improvement on what we have now. To be a reactionary is to borrow freely across time as well as space, incorporating political designs and experience from wherever and whenever. As Nick Szabo has observed, the most interesting, detailed and elegant European forms are found in the period we call feudal, and thus it is only natural that a reactionary design for future government will have a somewhat feudal feel.

But Patchwork is something new. It will not feel like the past. It will feel like the future. The past—that is, the democratic past—will feel increasingly gray, weird, and scary.

When you think that he seems to have predicted 2025 with remarkable precision, it won’t surprise you that his ideas have inspired the actions of authoritarian leaders outside the U.S. as well. He for instance continued with:

There are quite a few people presently in San Francisco who do not meet the second constraint, are pretty iffy on the first as well, and have no labor skills to speak of. What do we do with them? Sell their slums out from under them, obviously; demo everything, spray for roaches, rodents and pit bulls, smooth the rubble out with a bulldozer or two, and possibly a little aerial bombing; erect new residential districts suitable for Russian oligarchs. Next question?

But where do they go? Since their customer-service contract gives them the right of exit, these people—call them bezonians—can of course emigrate to any other realm in the Patchwork. This presumes, however, that said realm is willing to accept them. And why would it be? If our design does not provide for the existence of a large number of human beings whose existence anywhere is not only unprofitable, but in fact a straight-up loss, to that realm, it is simply inconsistent with reality.

He constipated a couple weeks ago in his post Gaza Inc.:

I’m worried that the resemblance between President Trump’s Gaza plan and mine will contribute to the weird delusion that I am secretly running the world. […]

Gaza, without its residents (even more important, without their complex maze of Ottoman-era land titles), is worth much more than Gaza with its residents, even to its residents.

This is 140 square miles of Mediterranean real estate, clear of titles, demolished and demined at a cost of perhaps ten billion dollars. This land becomes the first charter city backed by US legitimacy: Gaza, Inc. Stock symbol: GAZA.

The exit strategy of GAZA is to be the first sovereign corporation to join the UN. While there are many trillion-dollar companies, none of them has true sovereignty, much less some of the best land in the world. Is a trillion-dollar IPO a possibility? I think it’s a possibility. What if Adam Neumann runs the roadshow? Why not?

Suddenly, each former Gaza resident has $500,000 in GAZA tokens. Does that come with the right to live in Gaza? No—you don’t get any special treatment in Starbucks stores for being an SBUX holder. Does it come with shareholder voting rights over Gaza, Inc? No, because that would defeat the whole purpose of corporate governance—there would be a conflict of interest between the shareholders and the company.

I could show further evidence, which would include the Thiel-backed Praxis project's plans for a Greenland Charter City, and founder Dryen Brown's statement upon Thiel associate Ken Howery's appointment as U.S. Ambassador to Denmark, indicating that everything is developing according to plan. But this feels beyond the point.

Tech-Titans are in a driving seat of an economy, where success is measured to which level shareholder value creation - or return on capital (r) - outperforms the rate of economic growth (g). Their libertarian ideals, e.g. considering taxation as theft, are part of the problem that created those circumstances. A world in which per Thomas Piketty's famous formula, r > g, wealth inequality can only increase over time. It is true that economic and social inequalities have regressed to levels of pre-industrial feudalism. r > g is a big part of the reason.

Were the neoreactionary movement to adopt a less selective view of history, they'd repeatedly find instances where the very shortsightedness they exhibit led to the downfall of stable systems. While suppressing the populace may have been effective in the Dark Ages, we, as a population, are not illiterate peasants, serfs, or slaves anymore. Regardless of our origins, we have benefited from the seeds of enlightenment, cultivating complex social experiences and diverse opinions. We are billions, liberated by history from predetermined destinies assigned to us by birth.

The predicament of freedom for all at birth is a genie that they can't put back in the bottle. They know this. That is why they will appeal to greed. Lure residents into their Charter Cities by promising near-zero tax rates. - if you don’t like it? Just Exit.

As of today the legislation is unknown but we should not be focused on what entering a Charter City would bring with it, but how sure is it, that you can Exit it, without enormous strings attached? Assets will be held in crypto which can easily be structured to posses way less buying power outside this then established Network State. Will health insurances pay for treatments needed based on coming in touch with normally regulated or even untested substances? Even today U.S. federal law applies globally - smoking a joint in Amsterdam makes you inadmissible to enter the United States.

There are many potential pitfalls - some can simply be created when thresholds are reached. History has shown that even Jewish people were allowed to leave the Third Reich until 1940 - way into the war. They had to leave everything behind though while the obstacles to find a welcoming country were immense.

The hypocrisy of some is that we like to think of ourselves as sophisticated and evolved, but we're still also driven by primal urges like greed and power.
- Michael Leunig