An incredibly long, well reasoned and cited, highly vitriolic and personally insulting to Romer take on the "charter city" idea. (Really, I'm not kidding it is incredibly long.)
Summary: There is an English word for charter city, and it is colony.
I disliked almost everything about the tone and content of that article -- at first. His vitriol at the beginning is juvenile, bombastic, etc.
When he starts citing the case of the Belgian Congo is where the article becomes readable.
But when he writes in the imagined voices of Cromer et al -- well, that's good reading. He was making his points there, and not (just) bloviating. (<-- new word)
Then, carried away by the religious zeal that unpopular truths to often engenders, he drifts into 'papau new guinea people are neanderthals', and 'all third-world countries are dependent on foreign aid and protection,' etc. Huh.
The guy writes like a crank.
But, hey, some people call Wolfram a crank, and yet I'd rather have read him than not.
It's probably worth mentioning that this blog post put a big dent in the Patri Friedman's Seasteading 2009 conference; Mencius and Romer were both scheduled to speak, but apparently Romer was so offended by the blog post that he declined his invitation. Mencius was then disinvited.
Wow. You were not exaggerating -- this is insanely long for a blog post. Thanks for giving me something entertaining to do for the next two hours at work.
Summary: There is an English word for charter city, and it is colony.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/08/from-cr...