Dubai and Action

A great article on Dubai below; a free market paradise in the desert.

Through Mark Frazier's Open World project, ultimately part of the FLOW vision for global peace and prosperity is to help entrepreneurs to create free market zones like Dubai and Hong Kong around the world. These free market zones allow any worthless piece of real estate anywhere on earth to become havens of extraordinary prosperity. More importantly, they become anchors for a peaceful world. If the west Bank or Gaza strip became a free zone, conflict in the middle East would rapidly decline. We need free zones in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and all of the other war-torn disaster areas around the world.

To sketch this aspect of the FLOW/Open World project very briefly:

1. FLOW and Open World accelerate grassroots globalization through broadband elearning and remote services. FLOW recruits entrepreneurial college students to start remote service businesses in conjunction with developing world entrepreneurs. FLOW, Open World and other partners supply the technical and business expertise.

2. As we develop many thousands of these grassroots broadband enterprises, we not only support the entrepreneurs with technical and entrepreneurial expertise, we also integrate free market and civil society principles into the practical, nuts-and-bolts transfer of useful business how-to information.

3. As we develop a global constituency of such entrepreneurs interacting through our support network, we promote free zone competitions: Those groups of entrepreneurs who are best positioned vis-a-vis their governments, to create free zones, would win support from Open World to help create free zones in their countries. Because real estate values sky-rocket any time a free zone is created, there will be significant financial incentives for entrepreneurs to coordinate their actions to promote the creation of free zones in their countries.

4. Ten to twenty years from now, free zones will be exploding all over the world. The explosion of free zones will create dramatic centers of peace and wealth in many of the previously poorest and most unstable regions on earth. At the same time, the explosion of free zones will put pressue on the governments of large industrialized nations to become more responsible and less predatory.

5. In forty to fifty years, lasting global peace and prosperity become a reality for the first time ever. The world now becomes a wonderful place in which people dedicated their lives to discovering ever better ways of living.

All of this begins with our campus presentations next fall in which we launch the first cohorts of college students on Open World entrepreneurial projects.

Thanks to Mark Frazier for this amazing vision.

http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Writers/Casey/Articles/WilltheBoomContinue.html

Open Source as a Return to Free Market Principles?

"Open source embodies an ethos as fruitful and resilient as the closed capitalism Bill Gates represents: the spirit of democratic solutions to daunting problems. It's the creed of Emerson, who preached independent initiative and advocated a"creative economy." It's the philosophy of William James, whose pragmatism dictated that "ideals ought to aim at the transformation of reality." It's the science of Frederick Taylor, who proved that distributing work could exponentially boost productivity and replace "suspicious watchfulness" with "mutual confidence." It's the logic of Adam Smith, whose notion of "enlightened self-interest" among workers neatly presages the primary motivation for many open source collaborators. Finding the roots of open source in Taylor and Smith is especially significant because the approach isn't, as some insist, anticommercial or anticorporate. Rather, it is a return to basic free-market principles. The open source process fosters competition, creativity, and enterprise."

The complete Wired article: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.11/opensource.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=

Adventure Altruism, from Outside Magazine

I am very interested in creating a world in which doing good is fun, and in which fun is doing good. The "Adventure Altruism" movement is part of the spontaneous trend in this direction:

http://outside.away.com/outside/destinations/200502/volunteer-vacations_1.html