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There are advantages to keeping the title to the land component of a real-estate development intact - parceling the land into various lots by land leasing rather than subdividing. This creates a concentrated entrepreneurial interest in the success of the development, enabling it to be administered as a long-term investment property for income. The incentive for those holding the ground title is to supply public services and amenities to the place, creating an environment that a free market of producers will find attractive. To the extent the ground title holders provide these services and amenities, they can then recover their costs, and earn a profit for themselves and their investors. Whole settlements and communities can be established using this non-political model, with each development competing with the other in the market for clientele, and community services becoming a major growth industry.
The modern hotel is a great example of this development model in action. A hotel resembles a community in having private and public spaces. Its corridors are its streets, its landscaped lobby the town square. Its public transit happens to operate vertically rather than horizontally. In-house medical and security services assure round-the-clock safety of guests, visitors, and property. The hotel provides utilities and zones its space in an orderly manner for shopping, dining, entertainment, and other appropriate land uses. All it lacks that we customarily find in communities is a city hall exercising tax and other kinds of discretionary authority over the inhabitants and their property.
The resulting master lease becomes the critical programming language of the social software, capable of generating an elaborate but internally consistent web of relationships, all spelled out in the wording of the leases, subleases, and sub-subleases, etc. The sum of agreements actually in effect at any given point in time would be the written constitution of the community. Agreements could be as specialized and distinct as circumstances might warrant, so long as they did not contradict the master lease.
A set of natural-law principles together with supporting procedural rules would also need to be incorporated into the master lease. This would enable a system of law to be in place from the very beginning of the development, from which point it would evolve of its own accord. It would be a law, moreover, to which everyone in the community had consented.
For those of you who have ever dreamed of following in the footsteps of the heroes and heroines of Atlas Shrugged, and giving practical expression to an isolated community of like-minded individuals united together around the principles of liberty, private property, and unregulated free trade, click on the following link:
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