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Sympathetic to this argument, but a few points. (1) Minimum necessary legal innovation. First, just to clarify, new cities should not be "free of regulation." They should inherit the existing legal code, and just make a few very carefully thought through changes. For example, perhaps you set up a self-driving zone where all cars must be self-driving cars. But otherwise you keep the existing legal code. Just that one change — all cars self-driving — will have so many ripple effects that it'll lead to a totally different physical environment, and all kinds of new businesses setting up there. But you don't need to change the laws on (say) littering. Laws tend to reflect balances arrived at over decades or even centuries, and you don't need to do everything de novo. (2) Start small, think big. Also, yes, America used to be a better place to build. But to fix it you can't fix the whole thing at once. You have to pick one small patch and fix it first, and then scale up your success from there. Just like a tech startup. This is easy to say, and extremely hard to do, which is why people fight at the federal level for one quick switch to flip. But you can't get back to the economy and demographics of 1945 with 45% tariffs. It just doesn't work like that. There is no quick fix. You have to prove, then expand. (3) Frontier cities. Another point is that frontier cities aren't really the same as special cities. Not to nitpick, but the term "special city" implies that it's somehow better than all the other cities. In reality, a frontier city will often be worse than existing cities on most dimensions — other than the key dimension of permitting a new innovation. For example, the hypothetical self-driving car city in the first example will likely lack the bagels of New York, or the beaches of Miami, and so on. It will only be better for those who want to build a self-driving city as a model for the world. And also, it won't start out as a city at all — it'll look more like a town (maybe) or a few streets. (4) Consensual cities. One other point I'd make is that Starbase is a better model than designating some existing location to be a startup city. If you do it from scratch in some previously godforsaken area, like Starbase, there is both much less resistance *and* much higher levels of consent. Every single person who's in Starbase has, to first order, voted with their feet, their wallet, and their ballot to build a new city. It's all about the consent of the governed. That's how you reclaim democracy, like reclaiming free speech. This kind of opting-in to new experiments is actually also part of the US tradition, namely the laboratory of the states. Anyway, just some practical points to keep in mind. Also useful for building new communities outside the US, of course.