Sounds like one of the original US colonies, before 1913 came around and they implemented an income tax. Before then all government was funded by property taxes.

Maybe they could also have indentured servants...people who work the land for others, to eventually own it.

The ultimate gated suburb. It avoids not only the taxes that pay for the city the residents benefit from, but the taxes that support the nation as well, all the while demanding a large fee for the privilege.

So, what... all their restaurant workers and janitors and street sweepers and so on are going to be foreigners who are boated in and out daily?

Or are they going to be the "striving immigrants and starving artists" who the wealthy fuck citizens can spit upon, all the while telling them with just a little more hard work and bootstrappiness they can be wealthy fuck citizens too?

I hope they form their little nation and it gets hit by a massive natural disaster and they all perish. Fuck them all.

Sounds like the plot to BioShock.

I was worried about who was going to clean the toilets and serve the lattes until that last bit about the starving artists and immigrants: what a relief to know there is some foresight there.

Have we not already had enough laboratories of neoliberalism? It doesn't fucking work. Defenders are starting to sound all Herbert West. "The markets just weren't free enough!"

"Much of the tax base would be provided by a different property tax — one based on the value of the land and not the value of the property."

What are they trying to say? If the tax is a tax on improvements not the selling price of the land that is a Georgist tax scheme. Georgism was historically a progressive movement.. I would think Mudede would welcome the return of 19th century utopianism.

...a $300,000 buy-in? I wish them luck in finding teachers for their kids.

Supreme Ruler Dear, I believe that prior to the creation of the income tax, the federal government was funded almost entirely by tariffs. Property taxes probably funded state and local operations, but the tariffs are what gave Uncle his pin money.

As for the Belle Isle thing, I think it would be a wonderful thing to behold in theory (mostly because I think it would be a dismal failure that would be propped up by billionaires out of embarrassment) but I object to selling off Belle Isle. Can't they do it somewhere in the south where nobody cares?

Doesn't Puerto Rico take in more federal dollars than it gives back in taxes? So, these assholes' plan is not to be self-sufficient bootstrappers but to be welfare queens?

Mogk adds that such a scenario would make the island "a drain of talent and resources" at the expense of Detroit.

Serious question. How much talent and resources does Detroit have left at this point?

Sounds like a great way to give Detroit a free $1 Billion!

(Cuz, the first thing that'll happen is the US Govt will call bullshit on that whole "seceding" thing, swoop troops in to retake the island, and then hand possession of it back over to the city of Detroit again -- which will now have $1 billion in it's coffers to use in developing it properly!)

Belle Isle was one of the very few places where blacks and whites mixed in peace when I was a kid in the 60's. But the bridge to the Island was also where the 1943 race riots began (far uglier than 1967). It is the most beautiful place in all of the Motor City. The south shore faces Canada and the shipping channel to the rest of the Great Lakes. If you flashed your headlights at the passing ore freighters at night, they'd blast their horns in reply. They were loud enough to make you spill your Courvoisier and Coke all over the front seat!

@13,

I definitely should have put "talent" in quotation marks. I'm skeptical that there are many rich people (obviously the only people who matter to this dipshit) left in Detroit, and those who are left are surely already living in gated community enclaves so they don't have to deal with the rabble.

Sounds like a Ponzi scheme