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from the company-towns-and-company-scrip dept.
Nevada bill would allow tech companies to create governments:
Planned legislation to establish new business areas in Nevada would allow technology companies to effectively form separate local governments.
Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak announced a plan to launch so-called Innovation Zones in Nevada to jumpstart the state's economy by attracting technology firms, Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Wednesday.
The zones would permit companies with large areas of land to form governments carrying the same authority as counties, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and courts and provide government services.
The measure to further economic development with the "alternative form of local government" has not yet been introduced in the Legislature.
[...] The governor's economic development office did not respond to questions about the zones Wednesday.
(Score: 2) by https on Saturday February 06 2021, @03:37PM (1 child)
For nightmare fuel, look up export processing zones. Company towns are hell for their occupants.
I seem to recall it was Mussolini what suggested fascism should be called corporatism, as it was the usurping of state power by business interest.
Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday February 07 2021, @02:51PM
But to be fair, let's also compare those to the rest of those countries. For example, are the export processing zones (EPZ) of Haiti (the first country I found when I googled for "export processing zones nightmare") more nightmarish than the rest of the country?
My criteria: is it worst than its absence? For the Haitian example, I gather the key concern is that these zones work around tariffs that protect local industries from subsidized industries elsewhere in the world, particularly for agriculture. But that means making food more expensive in a country with a huge number of poor. Sounds to me like tariffs and the subsequent EPZs are just workarounds for problems that would be better fixed in other ways. It'd probably be better to just make the whole country a EPZ rather than just some small part of it.