Guarding his privacy with a fanaticism bordering on paranoia, the Perpetual Traveler would typically journey on a second passport under an assumed name. He would use post office boxes with no physical or forwarding addresses, and would always conduct business on a public pay phone to avoid snooping government agencies. He was a citizen of the world, with allegiance to none but himself.

He was also a man without a country because the key to his financial success was to stay on the run. Although no one knows exactly how many people ever successfully adopted this peripatetic lifestyle, the PT moniker became something of a legend among affluent individuals, particularly in the United Kingdom, where the tax rate approached 80 percent under the Labour government.

William* is a real-life example of a perpetual traveler. A native-born American who now travels on a Dutch passport, he tendered his U.S. citizenship in 2000 because he anticipated that the federal government would interfere in his oil refining and shipping businesses in the Caribbean. “I visited Cuba in the ’90s, and disagreed with what the U.S. was doing there,” he says, referring to the effects of decades-old sanctions that prohibit U.S. citizens and corporations from establishing economic ties with the communist nation. The Office of Foreign Assets Control, the arm of the Treasury Department that administers sanctions, came after any American trying to do business there, William says. “I never had any run-ins with them, and was in Cuba legally, but I wanted to get as far away from their jurisdiction as I could. I felt that I could not exercise my democratic right to travel with my passport. I wanted to do business with other countries that the United States has sanctions on.” William, who resides in the Netherlands Antilles, says he also has a moral problem with the IRS requiring Americans living abroad to file annual income tax returns.