The Quest for a Libertarian Island Paradise
WHEN MICHAEL OLIVER was a teenager in Lithuania, the Nazis shipped him by train to a series of concentration camps in Poland. He was the only member of his Jewish family not murdered during World War II. It does not take an overly capacious imagination to grasp why a man who experienced that might yearn to live under a government that would never casually wield such life-and-death power over its citizens.
In Adventure Capitalism, Cornell historian Raymond B. Craib relates how Oliver, who immigrated to the United States in 1947 after two postwar years in a displaced persons camp, self-published in 1968 a libertarian manifesto called A New Constitution for. With wealth earned as a land developer and precious metals dealer, Oliver then tried over and over to create a new country with a government funded entirely by voluntary contributions.
