Laissez Faire City

Laissez Faire City started as an idea in 1994, on an investment tour in Latin America. Some participating people discussed freedom and got to the idea (which is not new) of finding land that could be leased from an existing country for the specific purpose of setting up a real capitalistic society. A part of the model for this idea was Hong Kong, which was leased by Great Britain from China and whose capitalistic success was striking. Hong Kong was at that time approaching its end as a British crown colony, as the lease would soon end and Hong Kong be returned to China. So why not set up something new to replace it?

In 1995 a trust was set up, LFCIT, Laissez Faire City International Trust, with an ex- Russian diplomat, Mikhail Larguine, as the trustee. Then a long search for a reliable host country started. It began in Peru, where good contacts were established.

In 1995 the project was heavily advertised in internationally spread newspapers, like The Economist and Newsweek International, and it received a great deal of positive attention. Potential host countries were asked to get in touch. The Peruvian deal never became real, and several offers were explored but turned down.

Now a younger group of people who had been inspired by the media's attention to join LFC persuaded the trustee that the future of LFC would be to declare sovereignty in cyberspace and to develop tools for digital freedom. In 1997 this shift of goal was made. The mission was stated like this: "to facilitate the transformation of a segment of the global capitalist system into a new international commercial arena where sovereign individuals and corporations may operate outside the jurisdiction of any nation-state."

Here started the development of technologies for conducting business, banking, investment, etc., outside the common nation system. This did lead to some interesting products, like the Digital Monetary Trust (digital money), ALTA and LESE, systems for trading anonymously online, and some more. But it went slowly and they failed to attract more than a few enthusiastic users.

We can avoid most of the tedious details of what followed here. To make the story short, the wrong sort of people got involved and ultimately destroyed the project. LFC was liquidated and dissolved.

The lesson learned from LFC is that a more decentralised approach is better and safer. The visions of LFC can be made real, but not under one and the same structure.

The experience, both technical and other, of LFC is not lost. It was a great school. Unfortunately, not much genuine material about this project remains on the web.

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