One answer is that a “private” town charges land rent, not income tax. Yet when Georgists propose replacing income tax with land tax, libertarians are horrified. Note also that this is a matter of policy, not ownership. A “private” town could charge income tax if it wanted.

Why are the schools in “private” towns better? Not because they’re “privately” owned — that just begs the question. It’s because of politics, or lack of it.

Michael Anissimov has a misguided plan to start a monarchist commune in Idaho. But the lesson of Moldbug for people who want to “do something” is: start a private town. You can grow it into a city if you plan it well. Devin Finbarr wrote an essay “Hackertopia: Creating a City as a Startup”, where he proposes a scalable town that can grow into a city without planning problems.

Of course it’s essential to own all the yet-unused surrounding land, like Disney did with Reedy Creek.

It’s an interesting question. You’d think it would be profitable, though it requires a vast amount of capital to buy an existing town, let alone city. If you own all the land, you have a greater incentive to start a school, since not only do you capture the profits of the school, you also increase rents in the town. I wonder why we don’t see landlords monotonically growing their holdings over decades.