A Libertarian Island Dream in Honduras Is Now an $11 Billion Nightmare – Prospera touts itself as the world’s most ambitious experiment in self-governance. Critics say its founders have lost their way.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-02-13/a-honduras-dream-city-now-faces-11-billion-political-dispute?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTczOTUxMDAyMCwiZXhwIjoxNzQwMTE0ODIwLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJTUk43VTlEV1JHRzAwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiIwMDUxRTVCNjE4ODg0NjlGQjVDOUMxOEY5Mjk3RTZERiJ9.jflE8K7uWL-_hyfb38HvnQEBC4EhUqGOL4VDSwmclPk
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Submission Statement
The [‘Dark Enlightenment’](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
They so reliably hire scoundrels to run them because corruption cannot happen here!
They all are like this. For decades of Ayn Rand and otherwise created little plutocracies.
I bet Honduras had a noticable uptick in child disappearances when that “paradise” was founded. The sharks are well fed around this island, no doubt. Those rich “libertarian” types tend to burn through people like a stoner burns through weed.
I recommend everyone read “A Libertarian Walks into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears)” [A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears): Hongoltz-Hetling, Matthew: 9781541788510: Amazon.com: Books](https://www.amazon.com/Libertarian-Walks-Into-Bear-Liberate/dp/1541788516)
These sorts of experiments always fail miserably. If you don’t have people who buy into the social contract, then you get chaos because individual people are selfish assholes. No rules or regulations means fucking chaos.
Only an idiot could think this shit would ever work.
Isn’t this exactly what Curtis Yarvin and the Nerd Reich want to turn the US into according to his writings?
There’s really nothing more embarrassing than being a libertarian.
They haven’t lost their way. “Dream to nightmare” is exactly what “libertarianism” brings.
The griftiest grifters grift other grifters in a display of modern colonialism.
Libertarians are as ignorant about government, as communists are about human nature.
No, we need systems that control/support more than contracts and material possessions. And no, we cannot trust people to only act towards the common good.
I swear, the problem with the modern world is that noone remembers Aristotle and his golden mean. Every virtue falls between two vices. As is it with government as well.
It’s not some hippy “need to be balanced” no, it’s a struggle to avoid drifting towards any of the two vices.
Everybody in modern day seem to try really hard to turn vices into virtues.
I live for these stories of failed Libertarian settlements. They all have the same ending
This is going to end up like the Congo Free State. Privately owned, extracting wealth and unequal trade agreements from local populations.
They are not self-sustaining. These are a bunch of sovereign libertarian freeloaders who know they are using Honduran infrastructure like roads, landfills, the electric grid, and airports and don’t want to pay taxes to maintain them. These anti-social losers do not want to have to answer to the people they affect with their unilateral choices.
My take is that these things will fall apart once they grow beyond the size of a community where everyone knowns and interacts with everyone else because selfish people will then be able to prosper with little reprisal. It will be interesting to see if a group figures out that to stop to keeps things stable as they grow they will essentially have to become beholden to a leader or form a representative government and end up in the situation they were trying to get away from in the first place.
>His plan called for “Prosperity Zones” where laws and regulations would be “reset” and governmental powers like taxation, eminent domain, and policing would fall to a private corporation that ran the zone.
Wealth supremacists are a transnational threat to democracies worldwide. People need to pay attention and push back against billionaires running away with socieites production and hoarding it behind a wall.
Another great article about this from [Foreign Policy](https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/01/24/honduras-zedes-us-prospera-world-bank-biden-castro/) that is a year’s old by now.
I happen to be Honduran, and I dread what Trump and Musk might do to us in the future or how they will try to and influence my country, specially since the religious ties of the republican party have also been very capable of influencing religuous organizarions and people here in the global south with their “anti-woke” bs since tons of people here are also very religious. It is insane how some people here treat the US as this unfathomable leader we must leash ourselves onto, *specially* given the current circumstances.
This is what happens ever time Libertarian ideas are implemented in the real world. It never ceases to amaze me how many people are so willing to ignore all of the mountains of evidence that libertarian ideas are naive and will never work in the real world.
Libertarians will always fail because every last one of them believes they are the true John Galt and everyone else is a freeloader.
It is a political ideology of a nerdy, 15 year old boy that will one day show everyone how awesome he is and then you’ll all be sorry!!!
Liberia is the original libertarian experiment. (literally named after liberty..)
At some point they had child soldiers eating the beating hearts of their enemies to gain their powers… so that says how well it went.
I believe “a good libertarian” society is like “a good communist” society, likely only theoretical thing, human nature’s just too corruptible/exploitable/prone to evil. Even if the majority of people are good (not saying they are but hypothetically) a few bad/evil people can do an outsized amount of damage to a society/civilization without safeguards.
>Represented by international arbitration firm White and Case, the Brimen’s arbitration claim against Honduras argues that if the nation dismantled Prospera, it would owe its developers more than $11 billion — about one third of the country’s GDP — in lost future returns.
>In response, Honduras pulled out of the international treaty that made it subject to such arbitration. The case is pending.
>A State Department spokesperson told Bloomberg that, despite its bid to back out, Honduras is still subject to the arbitration because the Prospera dispute dates to earlier legal assurances.
Disgusting.
I remember something similar in Guyana happened in the 70s in a little place called Jonestown.
So im all for it! go live in a little town,island, city or whatever and take all your cult followers with you have a merry ol time and drink the koolaid, do the world a favor!
This reminds me of Cryptoland and Satoshi Island: [https://protos.com/what-happened-to-the-crypto-islands/](https://protos.com/what-happened-to-the-crypto-islands/)
Only an idiot believes in libertarian ideals. It’s fueled by greed pretending to be self reliance. The end result is a massive mess that costs real government tax payer money to fix.
In the end, it’s socialism that cleans up the crap done by and for the rich.
This is why there has NEVER been a prosperous libertarian government ever.
“I am Andrew Ryan and Im here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?”
I’m glad that even in a “futurology” sub people are rightfully clowning these sociopathic dorks
Not even 100 people and they can’t agree on what it means to be Libertarian.
One even says “you have to pick the right laws and other stuff.”
Makes sense as the Libertarian movement was machined by the Koch brothers. Like El Ron Hubbard they abandoned the joke, but the fantasy was too big to contain and went on without them.
So what happens if some group decides to invade their libertarian state? Do they have an army? Actually do they have any civic services like police, firefighters, sanitation workers etc?
The at pretty much explains the paradigm of Libertarianism. Most libertarians have no idea what libertarianism is. On r/libertarian they have arguments and ban people all the time over this topic alone, on what each person personally defines what it is to be a libertarian. It’s hilarious, and completely explains why libertarianism never successfully ever gets off the ground in any society or country. It just doesn’t work. If people even know what it means in the first place.
Coming to the entire USA soon. Tech Bros are the dumbest humans.
Of course if you scroll far enough down the article there’s a paragraph about them stealing groundwater from the local indigenous community.
>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 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 took as a threat.
This is coming to America. It’s Insane this article was just dropped and we’ve all been circulating [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no&t=192s) about tech billionaires taking over the world with city-state governments. In the video she specifically mentions Prospera. Praxis is the other development that currently has funding.
Soon it will be the literal Hunger Games people. Wake up. Get out in the streets. Walk out of your jobs. We must stop this now.