# Liechtenstein **Liechtenstein** is a tiny German-speaking principality between Switzerland and Austria. It is one of the last survivors of the hundreds of small states that once made up central Europe, and it found a modern business model in helping wealthy foreigners keep their money away from tax collectors. ## The prince's referendum Its ruler, Prince Hans-Adam II, is an admirer of [[Friedrich Hayek]]. In a referendum on March 14, 2003, he asked voters to expand his powers to dismiss the government, nominate judges and veto legislation, and said he would move to Vienna if they refused. They approved his proposal with 64 percent of the vote on a turnout near 88 percent. The Council of Europe's constitutional advisers had found the changes incompatible with European democratic standards. The same reform gave each of the country's municipalities the right to secede. ## Why it's on the map Liechtenstein is the closest living thing to the [[CEO Monarchy]] imagined by [[Curtis Yarvin]]: a hereditary owner-manager, a tiny territory, a right of exit, and voters who chose it. Quinn Slobodian devotes a chapter of *[[Crack-Up Capitalism]]* to its appeal for market radicals, under the title "Your Own Private Liechtenstein." It is a model that works for a microstate with a banking sector. It has not been shown to scale. ## See Also - [[Offshore Financial Secrecy]] - [[Patchwork]] - [[Network State Experiments Roster]]