I've been bitten by a lot of Anarcho-capitalist "bugs" in the last year since I've converted: Silver, gold, voluntarist-oriented education, etc., but I've been heralding an entrepreneurial spirit lately, and while I'm not sure if some of my ideas are particularly worth testing (like a vending machine for office supplies for offices to use) or potentially intelligent (like starting a power pole construction firm), I think I have one worth thinking about.

Granted, there are things like it, but basically I want to start a private city. Yeah, there's a thing like it starting up in Honduras, but I think I'd like to try this model I've been thinking of. It's a bit like playing SimCity, except you don't have to renounce your anarchist card. What follows is a lot of theory, given that I've spent a lot of time at my mindless minimum-wage job thinking about it and no computer there to look up pragmatic info, so feel free to yell idealist in my direction if you see something I didn't.

It starts with a giant plot of land, all under my ownership (or under the joint ownership of the stock company who buys it). A small network of paths is built, then the land is subdivided into lots. I suppose you could zone them, but I know from experience that's a good way to mismatch supply and demand, and a new city needs lots of growth right off the bat. These lots are either rented, sold, or rented to sell. There are no property taxes, no sales taxes, no sin taxes. All the costs of the founding of the city need to come voluntarily: Out of the lot division and lot sales and other free market business I or the joint stock company do.

The lots for sale probably won't sell right off if we were the first there, otherwise we'd be one of the last there and the land wouldn't have been for sale at cheap enough price for us to make a city. We first focus on the rental units. The rental lots probably won't sell fast either because who wants to build on property they won't own? That's a good point. Let's take some $5000 shipping containers and build apartments with them on a few of the rental lots. Shipping containers are generally well insulated against the elements, and they're cheap and allow for easy and modular construction. Plus they're easy to clean and maintain, and you can even build houses with them underground if you wanted to save on heating and cooling bills (although that would drive up the construction cost considerably).

As Jean-Baptiste Say famously never said clearly: Your supply is what creates your demand, and so we need to supply some things that make our plot of earth habitable in order to facilitate demand. A grocery store (owned by a private person or firm) would speed things along. I'm sure there are plenty of other things that are important, and if I brought along enough ancaps there would be sufficient diversity to ensure a wide enough variety of businesses for a small town. Given this, we might make an office park on one of the salable lots so that these entrepreneurs can have a place to work and we can still aim to recoup the cost of its construction and cover the founding costs.

We'll need power at this point. Food tends to go bad without refrigeration, so a grocery store might not be very happy otherwise. That's okay. Just like in the later SimCity games, I'd negotiate a contract with a neighboring city to have power delivered to us, at my own cost (or the joint stock's) initially. The rental units would have a slight increase in rent to cover it, and after awhile I'd be negotiating the cost distribution with any other private property owners in the city. That grocery store has an incentive to keep power flowing. After paying off the city, I don't. Maybe eventually somebody will start a solar farm or wind farm for this city, but right out of the gate we might need to think of the most voluntary method, rather than the voluntary method.

We might think about roads, but why build roads? We're removing ourselves from government, so most likely the people coming here might be more interested in something different like bike trails everywhere, or a rail service in place of asphalt everywhere. In fact, why even bother? All that is needed is a Jeep to get through rough terrain, and the roads can come when people demand them enough to pay for them. Still, a standard road connecting our entry gates to the rest of civilization would help people get to us in the first place. The costs of those would be covered by me or the joint stock at first, and eventually negotiated with the businesses in the area, since they'd benefit from outsiders coming in to see them.

As the city becomes more in demand, we might consider building more apartments or office complexes on the other rental units, or flipping the rental units into salable units so that someone else can specialize as a real estate agent or property manager while I or the joint stock can tend to different things. These property managers would probably own many lots, and therefore be trying to contract with our power provider (be it the city or a private entrant) for guaranteed power delivery over time periods to reduce risk and make his or her units more marketable, and thus taking that bit off my hands too.

I think after that it's really up to the free market of Ancapistan to figure out how things go. I'm mainly trying to nail down the beginning, since the initial hurdles are usually what turn people away. I don't think it's obtrusively expensive either. I was looking at real estate values in New Hampshire the other day, and there were 30 acre lots for $60k, which isn't too bad, and would be a manageable size. I'm not sure what state level taxes each state has so I don't know what might economically be the best option for location, but from what I hear NH would be a decent place to start.

So I guess it's a bit like the old Ancap Minecraft server, back when it was just Ancaps. Comments? Criticisms? Concerns? I'm a firm believer in thesis defenses making theses stronger, and I'd love to hear from all of you, ancap or not.