This article at Fast Company does a good job summarizing the philosophy behind the project.
Is their use of China’s special economic zones as their best example of how to lift millions out of poverty the most blatant vulgar-libertarian fallacy?
Or am I missing something?
What would be awesome is if one of the chartered organizations let the indigenous people have their say in what happens with the land.
But we all know that's not going to happen.
It absolutely is. See also David Ellerman's blog post: http://www.blog.ellerman.org/2012/07/new-instant-…
I think you might be going a little too hard, too early on the Charter Cities project. While there is, of course, a very real risk that the Honduran cities will prove to be just another corporate colony, it's not as though history repeats itself in every instance. At the very least, it's going to be hard to make things worse for the people of Honduras than what the existing Honduran government and past banana republics have done. Anyway, I think projects like this deserve a modicum of tepid hopefulness as they're not half-bad attempts at wresting the reins of power away from old, entrenched oligarchs. I don't think the people behind FCD, inc. are full-blown vulgar libertarians, but that doesn't mean they're bereft of flaws. However, they know the importance of local knowledge, and they don't seem to be irrationally overconfident about their potential success. So, yes, they're not likely to let indigenous people have a whole lot of say in what happens to the land, but they also don't seem as likely to enslave them (relatively speaking, I'm not insinuating that they won't be paid less than what they would receive in a free(d) market).