The two fundamental values I want to see in new countries are:

1. Safety
2. Abundance 

We don’t have a livable country if you don’t have safety. And if we aren’t doing this to get to post-scarcity, what are we even doing?

Here’s a spec for both: https://www.zaneausten.com/p/cities-that-pay-your-rent

People don’t move because one city is slightly better. They move because they can’t bear crime-ridden legacy cities and you can deliver a beacon of safety in an sea of chaos.

Unfortunately, I don’t see the majority of existing countries getting any better.

So we must build alternatives. Start with safe neighborhoods, then safe cities, and safe countries.

Then use the enormous chance we’ve been given to help our citizens reopen the frontier. The efficient frontier. The best possible country we can build.

That means different things to different people. To me, it means safety and a safety net.

What if your country could pay your rent? And utilities? And food, water, transportation?

How is this possible? LVTs and SWFs.

An LVT is a Land Value Tax, a tax thought to keep housing prices low, which is a multiplicative cost basis in the economy, and also not induce extra economic drag. 

A SWF is a Sovereign Wealth Fund, a fund that invests on behalf of a nation state and its citizens.

By driving down costs and earning a real and reasonable yield on assets, a country could pay for its citizens basic living costs in perpetuity.

The bottom two levels of Maslow’s hierarchy: ✅

We’re working on the love part. We’re thinking about robots, but aren’t quite sure yet. https://i.imgur.com/0M7UK9U.j

Read more here:

https://www.zaneausten.com/p/cities-that-pay-your-rent

The thing that people might not be able to get enough of in the 2020s is *safety*.

The universe tends to disorder. And without thoughtful leadership willing to see the obvious and make the hard changes to fix it, our neighborhoods will continue to degrade. Murders are rising. https://i.imgur.com/ZvOYKNa.jpg