Book Review: Free Private Cities by Titus Gebel

Free Private Cities: Making governments compete for you
by Titus Gebel ©2023
reviewed by Richard O. Hammer

In this wonderful book Titus Gebel builds confidence in the idea that new private cities, mostly free of government regulations, can be intentionally created. As such Gebel carries on with the project that we in the Free Nation Foundation (FNF) undertook during our active years, 1993–2001. And he goes further, adding valuable perspective.

The principal method advanced by Gebel for the creation of free private cities includes buying or leasing a chunk land from an existing country, probably a third world country. There would be a contract between this country and the entity which was founding the city. Gebel calls this founding entity the operator. There would also be binding contracts between the operator and each of the city’s inhabitants. This method of Gebel’s is similar to what I advocated in my article Why Not a New Hong Kong. It also resembles the model of a private hotel which was advanced by Spencer Heath MacCallum in The Art of Community ©1970. 

Spencer, who contributed several times in FNF, is also cited repeatedly by Gebel in Free Private Cities. Unfortunately Gebel does not cite any other contributors in FNF. Perhaps he never came across our work.

Strength From a Lawyer

When newcomers are presented with the idea of a new jurisdiction, intentionally created and mostly free of government, their greatest doubt is usually about law. This book has the most complete development of free-nation law that I remember seeing anywhere. And it is presented by an authority, since Gebel has a doctorate in international law, as he tells in his About me page.

Strength From an Entrepreneur

The credibility of Free Private Cities is also enhanced by Gebel’s business experience. He is a successful and apparently wealthy entrepreneur.

Practical Moderation in this Plan

I found a number of places in this book where Titus Gebel took a more moderate approach than I took in the FNF project. These differences concern:

1. how much effort should be invested in educating statists to see improvements which can result from reduction in the scope of government.
2. how much the operator should provide “public” services.

To explain these differences, I took the stance when founding FNF that FNF would be an effort by libertarians to build the strength of the free-nation movement from within — by building confidence among libertarians. As such our presentations would focus on an already-libertarian set of readers and listeners. This focus should stop our waste of time on trying to convince people who almost never listen to us anyhow. By starting thus among people who already agree on values and aims we should be able to make more rapid progress on our plan. In that 30-year-old mindset of mine Gebel’s slight differences stood out.

With regard to point (1) above, I was disappointed while reading the first three chapters in which Gebel gave what felt to me like a beginners’ introduction to freedom. But farther in, in Chapter 4, I started to appreciate what he was adding to the discussion among advanced readers.

With regard to point (2) above, Gebel focuses mostly on a plan in which law, streets, external defense, and some utilities would be provided by the operator. His reasoning when he is presenting these programs resembles, in my thinking, the justifications given by statists for any government program. Gebel reasons like: This service is essential to the success of the city and few people believe in private provision of this service so the operator cannot risk trusting the market to provide this service.

Such falling back to statist reasoning for “essential services” was what I hoped to break among libertarians when I founded FNF. And to this day I continue in that attempt to build deeper understanding of social order in my present project, the Resource-Patterns Model of Life.

But, for those “public” services noted, Gebel went on later in the text to moderate his initial presumptions that the operator must provide the services. Gebel showed that he was aware of the possibility of private provision. But he was not prepared to take an idealistic stance which might stall the advance of a project which was on the whole a big step in the right direction.

Conclusion

As such I wholeheartedly endorse Gebel’s approach toward Free Cities. His project is bearing more fruit than my old project in FNF, and I agree with his call to immediate practicality in place of the long-term academic idealism which I have pursued through my projects, FNF and the Resource-Patterns Model of Life.