Live and let live: inside the Free Republic of Liberland

When Vit Jedlicka was growing up in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s, his father was removed from his office job at the Institute of Weights and Measures and sent to work as a mechanic, after losing favour with the authorities for resisting Communist Party membership. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, the elder Jedlicka’s fortunes rose and fell again. He was achieving the capitalist dream with a chain of petrol stations, when the central bank raised interest rates to 25 per cent almost overnight in 1997, strangling the Czech economy and
nearly bankrupting the family business.

These experiences of being hammered by authority under communism – and hammered again after it – left a deep mark on the younger Jedlicka. He entered politics but never lost his belief that there had to be a better system. And so, in 2015, he created his own libertarian state, Liberland,
on a three-square-mile plot of no man’s land between Croatia and Serbia, where taxes are voluntary, laws are minimal and the economy runs on a virtual currency.