By Kennedy Maize
President Trump’s strange lust to acquire Greenland, the world’s largest island, sparsely populated and part of Denmark, is largely unaccompanied by any notion of just what America might do with this frozen land.
According to Reuters, billionaire tech mogul and PayPal founder Peter Thiel and some of his tech cronies have a plan for what would in Trump’s mind become an American colony. The designated U.S. ambassador to Denmark, Ken Howery, a PayPal co-founder and Trump’s ambassador to Sweden in Trump 1, is pushing the idea for “freedom cities” in Denmark. These are also referred to as “charter cities,” libertarian utopias unburdened by any form of external regulation.
According to Reuters, “Thiel spokesman Jeremiah Hall said: ‘Peter isn’t involved in any plans or discussions regarding Greenland.’”
Thiel and Howery have another cofounding pay pal with Trumpian ties, Elon Musk. There is no reporting that Musk is directly supporting the Greenland “freedom cities” concept. USA Today reported, “One ‘charter city’ investor wrote on social media that the U.S. needs Greenland as a test run for settlements on Mars, Musk’s enduring obsession.”
Thiel, 57, graduated from Stanford with a B.A. in philosophy in 1989, where he founded the influential student newspaper The Stanford Review. He received a Stanford law degree in 1992. Howery, 49, graduated from Stanford with an economics degree in 1998 and joined PayPal immediately, where he became the chief financial officer. Musk, 53, enrolled in Stanford graduate school in 1999 but only attended for two days before dropping out.
What would these “freedom cities” look like? First, and most importantly, they would be isolated from any outside regulation or other U.S. institutions. In 2009, Thiel wrote an essay for the libertarian Cato Institute, where he said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible…. Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country.”
President Trump has said, “These Freedom Cities will reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people—all hard-working families—a new shot at home ownership, and in fact, the American dream.”
Among the ideas tossed out for these “freedom” enclaves in Greenland, notes Newsweek, are hubs for “AI, driverless cars, space exploration, miniature nuclear reactors and high-speed rail.”
None of those economic ventures seem particularly well suited to Greenland.
The island is 836,330 square miles, compared to Alaska, the largest U.S. state (663,267 square miles). The population is about 58,000, almost entirely native Inuit. The least populated U.S. state is Wyoming, 576,851 people, according to the 2020 U.S. census.
Greenland is the world’s least densely populated nation in the world. Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, has about 16,000 residents. The bulk of the population is in scattered villages along the edges of the Island.
The dominant industry of Greenland is commercial fishing, with exports to Denmark. About half of the island’s gross domestic product (a tiny $3.24 billion in 2021) comes from support by the Danish government. About 40% of the workforce holds government jobs. Substance hunting is a major source of food. The country has under 100 miles of paved roads.
The country’s official language is Eskimo-Aleut Greenlandic, spoken by almost all of the residents, with three local dialects. Danish is also common and was a shared official language until 2009.
A government-owned company, Nukissiorfiit, provides most of the country with electricity, domestic water, and heat. Some 70% of the energy comes from 91.3 MW of capacity from five hydroelectric dams. The rest is mostly from oil, with some from burning waste.
Greenland is one of the coldest countries in the world. According to the World Atlas, “almost the whole year the temperatures are below zero degrees Celsius (32˚F). Greenland is surrounded by seas that are either permanently frozen or chilled by cold currents.”
The tech titans’ vision of “freedom cities” in Greenland is a manifestation of what the late libertarian economist and Cato Institute founder Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) termed “anarcho-capitalism.” The Encyclopedia Britannica describes anarcho-capitalism as a “political philosophy and political-economic theory that advocates the voluntary exchange of goods and services in a society broadly regulated by the market rather than by the state.”
The Rothbard website proclaims: “In a free society, an individual is not arbitrarily limited by their fellow man.”
Could that philosophy be applied in a U.S. colony? That would be highly unlikely as U.S. laws would apply. Congress would have to pass legislation exempting these pseudo-cities from the entire Code of Federal Regulations. No taxes collected, no federal funds distributed, no worker protections, no safety regulations, no public health rules, no criminal code, no military protection, no habeas corpus. No US citizenship.
For the broligarchs, that may sound like heaven. For most Americans, and certainly for Congress, it would sound like Cloud Cuckoo Land.
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