There’s an island in Honduras called Roatan that’s home to a city started and funded by a bunch of freak libertarian billionaires who never matured into full adults. And, as such, wish the rules of the world didn’t apply to them.
So, they created Próspera, a libertarian dream city with extremely low tax rates and few regulations. It’s a place where the extremely rich, petulant, and deeply unethical created in the hope of establishing a true utopia exclusively so a bunch of manchildren with too much money could foster unhindered innovation.
It ends up coming off more as a rebranded version of colonialism. And Hondurans are aware of that. It looks like that dream could be crumbling—to the surprise of absolutely no one other than the dipshits involved.
Próspera is Not Prospering At All
It’s hard to know where to begin when describing the issues facing Próspera, but a good place to start might be with the Honduran president who allowed it all to happen. Juan Orlando Hernandez served as Honduras’s 38th president, serving from January 2014 to January 2022.
He is currently sitting in prison here in the United States after he was found guilty of drug trafficking and money laundering. He accepted millions of dollars in bribes from narco-traffickers, including from the infamous Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. In June 2024, he was sentenced to 45 years in prison.
All that’s to say that a president and former drug trafficker is the one who allowed Honduras to be pillaged by American Silicon Valley billionaires. So, we’re off to a great ethical start here.
The initial idea for this city-state concept was created by the Venezuelan-born rich guy named Erick Brimen and championed by the likes of Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer. It was developed initially as a way to use private industry to help spur economic development in impoverished nations with the end-game goal of limiting illegal immigration into the United States and into other prosperous stations.
Sounds like a worthy goal on its surface. Help struggling nations stand on their own so other nations don’t have to incur massive influxes of immigrants that they struggle to house and care for. In practice, it doesn’t really seem to be working.
Romer himself now thinks the whole idea isn’t working out too well, according to a lengthy but fascinating feature article in Bloomberg. “It’s like a gated community,” he said. “They’re just trying to isolate themselves and do what’s best for them. They’re also somehow living in this libertarian fantasy that took root early in this project, that this will be a place they can be free of the government. That’s not gonna turn out well.”
Right now the dream is being tied up in massive lawsuits filed by the petulant man babies against Honduras, to the tune of $11 billion. They’re mad that the current Honduran president, Xiomara Castro, has been trying to repeal the legislation that enables these Zones for Employment and Economic Development (ZEDE) that allow private corporations to run their own governments.
But since the rich always get their way, these ZEDEs have fifty-year sunset clauses that functionally make them unrepeatable. How lovely. Brimen, who filed the lawsuit, also can’t be happy that the Honduran Supreme Court ruled that the whole project is unconstitutional.
Romer, who was one of the early proponents of the idea, just keeps shitting all over Próspera, saying it’s “not even close to what anybody would recommend for a model of what to pursue if you are trying to help a country develop.” As Próspera’s undercurrent experiment is being met with resistance, it’s currently in active talks with nations to bring the concept to sub-Saharan Africa.
Again, it’s just all colonialism rebranded. It’s the New Coke of colonialism
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