PayPal and Facebook are household names, and everybody knows the impact they have both had in peoples lives. For this reason, it’s easy to see how Peter Thiel, PayPal founder, and early investor of Facebook, has enough money to invest $1.25 million into an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters – according to Details.
The Seasteading Institute is seeking to build sovereign nations on platforms similar to oil rigs, in open water free from the laws and regulations of any existing place on land. And fortunately for them, they have gained the backing of Peter Thiel, and his $1.5 billion fortune. The experiment would be,
“A kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.”
At a Seasteading Institute conference ion 2009, Thiel said,
“There are quite a lot of people who think it’s not possible,” “That’s a good thing. We don’t need to really worry about those people very much, because since they don’t think it’s possible they won’t take us very seriously. And they will not actually try to stop us until it’s too late.”
Patri Friedman from the Seasteading Institute revealed that they are planning to launch their first project, an office park, off the coast of San Francisco next year. Seven years later, they plan on building full time settlements.
