Politics

The Freedom Cities Coalition is a project of NeWay Capital, a company that has been centrally involved in the development of Prospera, a private, “free market,” crypto-friendly enclave in Honduras. Prospera was made possible by a special regulatory setup, dubbed a special economic zone (or ZEDE), that was established in the country in 2013 in the wake of a U.S.-backed coup. ZEDEs allow for private actors to essentially move into geographically partitioned areas and write their own regulatory and judicial rules.

Prospera is also part of something called the “Network State,” an anarcho-capitalist ideological movement, backed by tech-billionaires, that seeks to create privately run cities with native cryptocurrencies.

Where will America’s new “Freedom Cities” be built? It seems quite possible that the Network Staters want to build them in our national parks. On its website, the Freedom City Coalition notes that 28 percent of U.S. land is “federally owned and ready for innovative development.” It doesn’t specify what kind of federal land is “ready” for this “innovation,” but most of the government land that isn’t used for farming and energy development is used for wildlife conservation.