Well, it's partly successful.

The FEZ "Fee Economic Zone" concept is actually a bit of a Fabian program whereby you create massive de-regulations in an already heavily regulated economy in very specific sectors in very specific areas so that you can control a corporate oligarchy that are the only ones capable of exploiting your regulations to their advantage. This is how Shenzen came to be.

While it would be great to try in small, local, political strata (like counties); the states themselves are fully aware of how dangerous it is to the profitability of other locales, and the major cities. A small city offering massive local tax exemptions can expect corporations to hurl themselves at it, even with things as simple as property tax; which is why the state tries to regulate even those within reason.

This is why something like the Free State Project is valuable. If you can weaken the state's control over local counties, you can actually allow local governments to experiment with these kinds of de-regulations and liberations.

With wages, the governments are very well aware of just how powerful that could actually be (especially because that could upset how they control mass migration, confuse calculations on the income tax, and allow for dangerous amounts of "gig economy" work that would allow poor people to improve their status in life and pull away from welfare dependency). As a result, wages can't be set to zero because of restrictions at the federal level without the DoL getting involved and going on a fucking warpath.

The only advantage you could take is allowing inflation to keep increasing, and refusing to move the minimum wage past $7.50 /hr, and trying to create some kind of state wide "freelance contractor" scheme for employees. But then you still have to fight restrictions on "overtime". But even if you manage that: why are poor people working that much in the first place: to save money. If saving money doesn't mean anything because of inflation, then what's the whole point?

Truth is, you'd have to develop a rather elaborate fucking governmental program just to get around government restrictions.

To be honest, and this would be crazy, you'd actually have to build a kind of near militarist program, that's equivalent to a socialist "German Labor Front". You'd have to create a branch of the military that can just enlist reservists whom can be "recruited" at will for any price, paid as an addition to some base salary. You'd have created a vast Libertarian Militarist make-work project, just to get around the federal regulations that exist anyway.

"We're not employing people who are choosing to work overtime for low pay, we're deploying the Labor Front to a emergency labor shortage... yeah, that'll do."

"Oh, their pay? Well their pay can be deposited into this high-yield savings account that's matches their purchasing power to the price of gold. They can then transfer the remaining cash to a bank of their choice."

It's a bit convoluted, and you'd have a hard time convincing Libertarians that you Libertarian Labor Front, run by the military, is actually Libertarian, just to get around federal wage regulations.

Well, it's partly successful.

The FEZ "Fee Economic Zone" concept is actually a bit of a Fabian program whereby you create massive de-regulations in an already heavily regulated economy in very specific sectors in very specific areas so that you can control a corporate oligarchy that are the only ones capable of exploiting your regulations to their advantage. This is how Shenzen came to be.

While it would be great to try in small, local, political strata (like counties); the states themselves are fully aware of how dangerous it is to the profitability of other locales, and the major cities. A small city offering massive local tax exemptions can expect corporations to hurl themselves at it, even with things as simple as property tax; which is why the state tries to regulate even those within reason.

This is why something like the Free State Project is valuable. If you can weaken the state's control over local counties, you can actually allow local governments to experiment with these kinds of de-regulations and liberations.

With wages, the governments are very well aware of just how powerful that could actually be (especially because that could upset how they control mass migration, confuse calculations on the income tax, and allow for dangerous amounts of "gig economy" work that would allow poor people to improve their status in life and pull away from welfare dependency). As a result, wages can't be set to zero because of restrictions at the federal level without the DoL getting involved and going on a fucking warpath.

The only advantage you could take is allowing inflation to keep increasing, and refusing to move the minimum wage past $7.50 /hr, and trying to create some kind of state wide "freelance contractor" scheme for employees. But then you still have to fight restrictions on "overtime". But even if you manage that: why are poor people working that much in the first place: to save money. If saving money doesn't mean anything because of inflation, then what's the whole point?

Truth is, you'd have to develop a rather elaborate fucking governmental program just to get around government restrictions.

To be honest, and this would be crazy, you'd actually have to build a kind of near militarist program, that's equivalent to a socialist "German Labor Front". You'd have to create a branch of the military that can just enlist reservists whom can be "recruited" at will for any price, paid as an addition to some base salary. You'd have created a vast Libertarian Militarist make-work project, just to get around the federal regulations that exist anyway.

"We're not employing people who are choosing to work overtime for low pay, we're deploying the Labor Front to a emergency labor shortage... yeah, that'll do."