Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, has funneled $1.25 million to the Seasteading Institute that is pushing a plan to create floating city states that would eventually become libertarian countries in international waters, Liz Goodwin writes in her
Yahoo blog The Lookout.
The information is included in a lengthy profile of
Thiel in Details magazine, Goodwin reports.
The Seasteading Institute’s ultimate goal is to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms. 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," Goodwin quotes Details as reporting.
"There are quite a lot of people who think it's not possible," Thiel said at a Seasteading Institute Conference in 2009.
"That's a good thing,” Goodwin wrote. “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.”
The group hopes to launch an office park off the San Francisco coast next year.
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