Próspera puts the idea of competing jurisdictions to a practical test in Honduras. Trey Goff discusses its governance, investment and development, raising a central question for the Free Cities movement: what becomes possible when people can choose between different systems of rules?
"If there's one thing I've learned over the last couple of years that has made my life magnificently better, it's that reality is not what it seems like in any meaningful sense. And there's so much more out there."
"People simply don't believe that it's actually happening. That is the first challenge, that it's real and that it's actually happening. And it's better to be real and controversial than to not exist and be irrelevant."
"I believed in it very much, to the extent that I waged my own career and my own life by coming here. It had to resist. I used to joke that if it hadn't resisted I would have stopped practising law, stopped believing in it."
"If you have a bad owner, the people will leave. If he's not doing what he promised, if he's not keeping them happy, customers leave all the time. The worse he is, the sooner people will leave, he'll go bankrupt, and someone else will buy the property that can do a better job with it. That's the way business works."
"I came to visit, just to visit. On the second day, I bought a motorbike from Facebook Marketplace just to lock in. Okay, this might be my place."
"The most important thing that can happen now with this new government for every other project out there.. is for Próspera to be successful. Because the more successful we are, the more people can point to us and say we're going to replicate that in our country."
"We know the formula for prosperity. "
"We're trying something here, and we're going about it in a very responsible way and according to the ideas that we think work. And if they don't work, then—well—we'll learn from that, and you can try your version of this."
"What they're building, without knowing it is the nomad dream.. Nobody knows about it."
"A pet peeve of mine is the idea that Free Cities are going to full of Westerners... I think Most Free Cities that are successful will be local based like Morazan . Morazan can grow a lot faster than Próspera because it's target market is the people of Honduras."
"It's all theoretical until it happens. And now we're literally handing over keys to people who own property in a free private city in Honduras."
"I felt very hopeful for my region that we could get this off the ground, because the reality is that reforming these countries in Central America and other places is just so hard and the incentives are so misaligned, so completely misaligned. My perspective after trying to reform in country is that you have to find...
"I am a firm believer that Próspera will change Honduras. Honestly, we have suffered so much. So many governments have hurt us. I think that Próspera is the solution."
"More and more people are interested and I think that COVID accelerated this and made people think about: 'OK, should I live where I live right now?... Or do I want to live in this place with this governance model?'"
"It's good freedom, for sovereignty, for democracy to not have all the power concentrated in the national government. [...] There's an understanding of sovereignty that's really the core in this whole issue. I think sovereignty resides in the people and I think it should be very well distributed through various inst...
"You make it a community issue, and you assign the responsibility to a particular entity. You don't just leave it in the hands of the central government. You leave it in the hands of a local organization that everybody knows each other, so if you're not doing things right, you're going to be ashamed."
"So my revenue is dependent on your success and your success depends on my regulation. So I want to make sure that I have the best regulation and the best regulatory environment possible for your business to be successful."
