Submitted by Paul Rosenberg via FreemansPerspective.com, [4]
No, I’m not kidding. I can solve the immigration and refugee crises without more wars, without rounding people up like animals, and while boosting the GDP. It’s not hard. All you have to do is stop thinking inside the same old status quo.
Here’s the plan:
#1: The Fed provides loans to build new cities. Seeing that they were recently spending $85 billion per month buying up mortgage debt and Treasuries, we’ll take that as a cap. We’ll buy up farmland (or forest or desert) and start installing utilities. There’s such an incredible amount of open land that we’ll have thousands of spots to choose from.
#2: The federal and state governments forbear all income taxes from anyone who opens a business in the new cities for as long as they operate those businesses. Think they’ll come?
#3: The federal and state governments forbears all taxes from undocumented immigrants (and their families) who choose to reside in the new cities. They also forebear all enforcement of immigration laws upon them. Wanna bet they’ll show up?
#4: The federal and state governments forbear all taxes, regulations [5], fines, bases, offices, employees, services, and impositions for 100 years in the new cities. “Outside the status quo,” remember?
#5: The federal and state governments guarantee that entry and exit to/from these cities will be unimpeded.
#6: Federal and state governments agree that they will provide no welfare, disability, or any other handout programs in the new cities for 100 years. We don’t want a dependent class.
Oh, and one more thing:
#7: No person or corporation who has done business with any federal or state government over the past 10 years shall be considered for any such loans; nor shall anyone with more than incidental political involvement. A panel of radical anarcho-capitalists shall decide.
There are a few fine points that could be added, but these seven major points just about do it. The plan falls short of philosophical perfection (witness the Federal Reserve being named in it), but it had to be something that would work tomorrow morning, and this would.
And Then…
And then we’ll have an excellent free-for-all. These cities would become the places to be. Businesses would start looking for facilities the next morning. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Immigrants would flock to the cities.
Libertarian and entrepreneurial types, disgusted by the status quo, would load up and drive to the new cities just to get away from regulations. Nonconformists of a dozen descriptions would start buying property, even without tax breaks.
These cities would, within only a few years, become the coolest places on the planet – by far.
But…
That’s right, there won’t be any government-provided policemen or courts. And yes, I know how many people have been trained to freak out about that: “It will be murder, death, and mayhem!”
I’ll be taking bets on that one.
The people who come to these cities would be coming to escape from their chains and to be productive. [6] Those are precisely the kinds of people who clean up a town. And with no taxes to pay for 100 years, they’ll have plenty of extra money to spend on whatever security services (or whatever else) they need.
And the Results…
These would be the results:
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The plan will cost the various governments nothing at all. (I’m presuming here that the loans would be repaid… which should be almost a cinch.)
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The skittish citizens who can’t sleep at night because of immigration could all relax; all of the scary people would be in new cities and wouldn’t be terrorizing them anymore.
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This would definitely juice the GDP.
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10 cities of a million people each would be easy to build. Just ask the Chinese.
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Most of the usual troublemakers would separate from the status quo, and stop bothering them.
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Fun, innovation, and progress.
So, why not?
And this same model might do nicely in Europe. They have plenty of empty land too.
