Good morning! Last year, crypto enthusiasts gathered in Montenegro. Many of them thought that in Montenegro the state would embrace them strategically and would allow what is currently happening in Honduras on the island of Roatan, where there is currently a special independent jurisdiction of Vitalia, a laboratory of economic freedom.
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Bitcoin State
Generally, the libertarian idea implies social liberalism and economic conservatism. It implies that the state and the church have nothing to do with your private lives and that everyone is free to be what they want and do what they want as long as it does not endanger someone else to be what they want and do what they want. It simply means that my freedom is limited only by the limit of your freedom. In terms of economics, libertarians believe in a minimal state. Besides them, there are also anarcho-capitalists, who deny the need for a state in general, but we will talk about them another time.
For libertarians, the state should be an apparatus that serves only the basic common needs of a society, without spending a lot of money for that. Therefore, taxes should not be high. The state should not be an employer, entrepreneur, etc. It must not redistribute the wealth of a community. The more the state gives, the more it takes. In the end, it becomes a depersonalized bureaucratic monster controlled by a parasitic class of bureaucrats who do nothing but feed on the money of taxpayers, those who do and create something.
Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies are a means of taking one of the means of control and regulation, namely money, out of the hands of the state. That’s why libertarians immediately embraced them.
For several years now, there has been a movement of pop-up nations and pop-up cities in which small communities gathering scientists, philosophers and entrepreneurs appear and disappear around the world for a few months. It lasted for a couple of months in Lustica last year. The idea is that economic freedoms can be the trigger for a quick and powerful jump in scientific progress. Many companies have started cooperation with this and such communities, and some countries have decided to experiment with special jurisdictions and free economic zones.
One such event is currently taking place in Honduras. This country, unlike Montenegro, readily welcomed the foreign community last year, by creating a special jurisdiction on the island of Roatan ten years ago and attracting a bunch of creative people through the e-residency programme, who began to develop a special economic ecosystem there.
In order to participate in the project, and get permission to work at Roatan, investors have to pass a serious government vetting, after which they create the rules of the economic game. They must respect the Honduran Constitution, as well as the basic provisions of the criminal code, labour and environmental legislation. Investors organize the court themselves, but they also take care of security in the territories they manage. Employees of the judicial system, police and other services created by the investor, which replace the state jurisdiction, must be Honduran citizens.
Belgrade libertarian Petar Cekerevac wrote about his experience at Roatan on Twitter.
What do you think? Could special jurisdictions in limited areas in Montenegro be a trigger for social development? To what extent are they in line with EU regulations?
We were trying to experiment with free customs zones, and were compromised a lot as a result of cigarette smuggling. Could a story like this attracting creativity and knowledge make a difference?
There is a very important issue of national security and the state must ensure that these projects are not used for their own needs by organized criminal groups and sanctioned governments and regimes. But also, that there are no people at the head of the state like Abazovic who are ready to slaughter an ox for a kilo of meat, as he did last year when he created a world scandal, in order to argue with Spajic.
That’s it for today. We wish you a pleasant rest of the day.
Kind regards,
Ljubomir Filipovic, CdM analyst and columnist
(The opinions and views of the authors of the columns are not necessarily those of the CdM editorial staff)
