Everywhere you look, it seems like there is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to plans for futuristic, dystopian systems of government. However, one such plan has already materialized and has caught the attention of some very powerful people: freedom cities.
While it’s too early to tell if freedom cities will be a dystopian nightmare or, in the more likely scenario, a merely fascinating innovation, what is clear is that many powerful people have been interested in the idea for years.
‘Our objective will be a quantum leap in the American standard of living.’
First, what are freedom cities?
Freedom cities are essentially deregulated economic zones designed to encourage innovation and technological development without (or with much less) cumbersome bureaucracy, rules, and taxes.
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Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images
According to an article by Newsweek, the creation of a freedom city in the United States would require at least two states to demarcate land along their borders and to agree on taxation and policy.
But why should we care about what is probably just a billionaire pipe dream to ease the billionaire tax burden?
Well, one of the powerful people who is very interested in these cities is President Donald Trump.
Freedom cities have been on President Trump’s mind for nearly three years at least.
In March 2023, then-former President Trump issued a video statement detailing several plans to revitalize American innovation.
Past generations of Americans pursued big dreams and daring projects that once seemed absolutely impossible. They pushed across an unsettled continent and built new cities in the wild frontier. They transformed American life with the interstate highway system — magnificent, it was. And they launched a vast network of satellites into orbit all around the earth.
But today our country has lost its boldness. Under my leadership, we will get it back in a very big way. If you look at just three years ago, what we were doing was unthinkable — how good it was, how great it was for our country.
Our objective will be a quantum leap in the American standard of living. … Here are just a few of the ways we can do it.
Almost one-third of the land mass of the United States is owned by the federal government. With just a very, very small portion of that land, just a fraction, one-half of one percent — would you believe that? — we should hold a contest to charter up to 10 new cities and award them to the best proposals for development.
In other words, we’ll actually build new cities in our country again. These freedom cities will reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people — all hardworking families — a new shot at home ownership and in fact the American dream.
While President Trump’s plans have not yet been put into practice in the United States, the idea of a freedom city has already been put into practice in Honduras, for example.
According to Newsweek, Pronomos Capital, a venture capital firm backed by tech billionaires Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, has helped push for the creation and development of Prospera ZEDE, a privately run economic zone on parts of Roatan, an island off the coast of Honduras, and on the coast of La Ceiba, Honduras.
According to the company’s website, Próspera ZEDE (Zone of Economic Development and Employment) is “a startup zone with a regulatory system designed for entrepreneurs to build better, cheaper, and faster than anywhere else in the world.”
However, this economic zone in Honduras has seen its fair share of criticism from locals, pushback from the Honduran government, and legal challenges since its establishment.
Think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute have also taken an interest in the creation of freedom cities in the United States. According to a March 2025 report produced by the AEI Housing Center, freedom cities “offer a dynamic framework for re-shoring critical industries, expanding housing affordability, and facilitating rapid progress in emerging fields such as biotechnology, aeronautics, and energy.”
The AEI even drafted a “homesteading map” showing the pockets of federal land in Western states that could potentially be used for freedom cities, forecasting that the development of freedom cities would take anywhere between 40 and 50 years.
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