Couldn't agree more, as someone very much on the left. I read The Road to Serfdom and along with Smith and Basquiat it made me a libertarian early on. Later I turned and I'm now very much on the left but still respect Hayek's ideas and arguments.
We really need special economic zones for experimenting with alternative economic and social systems. Unfortunately, the tradition has been to have a single system for an entire country, and if not all people want it, too bad.
States don’t exist in a vacuum. We’re constantly experimenting as it is, if you want to call politics experimenting, and every new law or ordinance passed, every new executive order issued, every new opinion written by the courts and every new verdict reached by a Jury changes the “system” a little. You could call it the ultimate experiment in reflective social programming if you want to get nerdy about it, but I wouldn’t use such terms myself.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabia
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_City
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_States
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Autonomous_Zone
I have strong libertarian sympathies, but the reason I’m not a full throated libertarian is that it isn’t an ideology that effectively seeks to acquire power, and without being able to win elections, they can never pave the way for the society they seek, nor would it be able to withstand aggressive neighbors or slight changes in values across the community. A libertarian state is transient at best.
I also don’t want to prop up SEZs that would massively violate peoples’ natural rights for the sake of experimentation. Freedom is without Kings or Serfs or Slaves.