Freedom Cities: Oxymoronic Thinking At Its Best

Americans are suckers for good advertising. Age, race, gender, geography, or political party are irrelevant. We all get suckered in by some good advertising. It's why Mars, the parent company of a wide array of candy like Skittles, Snickers, Twix, M&M's, and Milky Way, made over $45 billion in revenue in 2021. Good advertising explains Andrew Tate's meteoric rise, the Democrat's control of black women, and why Jennifer Lopez has as many rings as Tom Brady.

It also explains the excitement about Donald Trump's pitch for freedom cities.

"These freedom cities will reopen the frontier, reignite the American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a shot at home ownership and the American dream," the former President declared in a video touting his Agenda 47 initiatives.

He touted the idea again at his campaign stop last night in Davenport, IA.

Freedom cities are as oxymoronic as unbiased opinions, virtual reality, militant pacifists, foreign nationals, and free healthcare. All the people flooding into the country are oxymorons: uninvited guests. 

Freedom Cities is the Abundance Agenda with a MAGA paint job. The Abundance Agenda is a decades-old liberal utopian governmental approach of spend, spend, spend until the country has a surplus to lift everyone out of poverty, provide free healthcare, free housing, and so on and so forth. (Imagine believing Trump is some far-right winger, huh?)

The problems with this agenda are evident once you remove yourself from the communist fairytale of dancing unicorns and rainbows or you take off the MAGA-tinted glasses.

First, the Abundance Agenda operates from the ideological foundation that the country has a scarcity problem. It doesn't. It has an overabundance problem. It starts in DC. There is an overabundance of taxation and regulations, making it difficult for developers to build new housing. Drive through many urban or suburban areas and you will see dilapidated houses, decayed storefronts, and abandoned buildings. If Democrats, and some liberal Republicans, lightened up on taxes and building regulations, many problems related to housing and homelessness would, to a large degree, work themselves out. The cities already here can be revitalized and not abandoned in favor of some futuristic cosmopolis. Mark my words: Detroit will be a ghost town filled with deafening silence by 2050.

Second, building a city from scratch is really expensive. Saying our country is broke is an understatement. Approximately 7% of our national budget is interest. That number is expected to be around 15% by 2031. We are currently borrowing money just to make the interest payments.

Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced the NEOM mega-city project a few years ago. The price tag? $500 billion. Built on uninhabited "virgin" land, the smart city will have facial recognition technology throughout its borders, working in collaboration with AI-enabled robotics such as robot butlers and flying drone taxis. In addition, the city hopes to boast about the world's largest hydrogen plant, the most advanced 5G network in the world, and, as the cherry on top, a large artificial moon hovering over the night sky. Reports suggest the cost would be upwards of $2 million per resident.

Estimates show the average cost per resident for a new city in the United States is in the neighborhood of $20,000. That number is considerably cheaper than new city projects in other developed countries. For example, land for Songdo in South Korea would be, when converted to US dollars, $500,000 per resident. The Khazar Islands near Eastern Europe and Western Asia would be $100,000. Thames Town in China is estimated at $78,500.

America is also entertaining the super city concept. Billionaire and former Walmart US eCommerce CEO Marc Lore plans to build Telosa, a $400 billion city in the middle of a desert in the western United States. Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Texas, and Utah are the five states in the running. A digital mock-up of the city looks like a group of computer chips.

Telosa is expected to take 40 years to complete. The first section is expected to be completed by 2030.

Third, there is the electoral argument. Some conservatives believe building freedom cities will give Republicans an advantage in future elections. By building conservative-minded cities in "vote blue until I'm through" states, Republicans might be able to flip deep blue states like California, Illinois, or Minnesota. This line of thinking is a recipe for calamity. Cities will always become Democrat strongholds. The larger the city, the more left-wing it will become. Long ago, Chicago was a mostly Republican city. That was when The Windy City was home to less than 100,000 residents. Now that the population is over 2.5 million, it's bluer than the bear in the Cubs logo. Cities naturally attract liberals, who believe their basic "rights" and needs should come from the government. Conservatives typically want a less intrusive government and the freedom to handle many issues independently. Thus, they live in more rural areas.

Now, I understand Trump is a real estate guy. Building is in his blood. I understand why overseeing newly-created cities would be enticing. I'm sure every freedom city would have a Trump tower. It would be a boon to his legacy.

Furthermore, constructing cities are great opportunities for any politician. They can brag about how many jobs they created, get a boulevard named after them, and cut red ribbons all over the city. But as any avid or casual student of history knows, history is full of unintended consequences. The Missouri Compromise and the Kansas-Nebraska Act were once considered good ideas. With the benefit of hindsight, though, they were disastrous. The Federal Reserve Act was once considered a crowning moment in American politics. Bull sugar honey iced tea.

If Trump wanted to promote an initiative that would pave a better future for America, he would take a page from Muammar Gaddafi.

According to Western historians, Gaddafi was a maligned leader. He ruled Libya from 1969 to 2011. He was a socialist. I fully understand socialism is the number one, two, and three killers of people in world history. However, some aspects of socialism can be fine-tuned and used to ensure the betterment of a nation. Under Gaddafi, Libyans who wished to take up farming would receive land, a house, equipment, seeds, and livestock free of charge to start their farms. I disagree with the free part. Nothing is or should be free. Anything marketed as free should be questioned. But, if Trump backed a plan where startup farmers would get land, housing, equipment, etc., at a discounted rate or a rate based on crop production, the country would benefit greatly from those farming subsidies. Not the pork-filled Farm Bill the Obama Administration passed in 2014, but a piece of genuine economic nationalist farming legislation. Incentivizing farming will not only be helpful to the nation agriculturally, but will encourage more people to get away from the cities, forging their own path to economic and cultural freedom. More farmers also mean more conservative voters. Farmers vote Republican at an almost 75% clip. It would be a win-win for Trump and the future of populist nationalism.

Conservatives backing the Trump Freedom Cities plan reminds me of the Romney supporters in 2006. They cheered when he passed RomneyCare in Massachusetts but chastised similar ObamaCare legislation years later. 

Super cities are, unfortunately, the trend of the future. It is estimated that 68% of the world's population will live in cities by 2050. This trend will not be reversing any time soon.

Bigger cities are the way forward. Falsely true.