On Saturday, April 26, 2003, at 08:43 PM, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
Anyway, we all have the ultimate canary in a coal mine. If *Tim* decides it's time to go, than the US is officially in the shitter and it's time to grab the bug-out bag.
Personal liberty is of course not the same thing as economic or business liberty, of course. It might be that Costa Rica, for example, would be a fine place to live with low income taxes (hypothetically) even if it not a great place to headquarter a corporation in. (I picked Costa Rica because it has a tropical climate, some Dutch hackers have a place there, a well known digital money advocate relocated there, and it has no standing army. By coincidence, Intel located an assembly plant there. But not its corporate headquarters, needless to say.) Selling my house, packing up my voluminous amount of stuff (or worse, discarding it), and moving to Costa Rica or the South of France, or, Allah forbid, moving onto an oil platform or gunnery turret or whatever, is not easy to do. Furthermore, Uncle Sugar thinks he has the right to take my assets for the first 10 years I'm no longer having other countries invaded on my behalf, no longer having negro welfare mothers breeding on my behalf, and no longer getting any of the so-called benefits of advanced civilization. Those who have exited the country have found the tax man hounding them for years. Probably if I were to leave the U.S. I'd do it the old-fashioned way: buy a lavish, well-protected seaside villa in Mexico and just pay off the local cops and politicians. How I'd get my money out of the U.S. without Uncle Sugar taking 35-50% for the aforementioned country invasions and welfare breeders is an unsolved problem. (Hint: Stuffed suitcases don't work, for various reasons.) [This space reserved for insertion of usual silliness about living out of suitcase, stuffed or not, and being a "perpetual tourist," which only works if one is below a certain net worth and if one likes to travel a lot.] Meanwhile, it's easier to have a lot of guns, some perimeter alarms, various sets of "documents" to facilitate escape from Airstrip One, and to minimize stock sales so as to minimize Uncle Sugar's theft. If I leave, I expect it will be one step ahead of the Thought Police, aka Ashcroft's Army.
In the meantime, Young, as usual, writes great word salad, this time about what a shitty country we are, but the still-warming pot is, at
I still can't understand anything he writes. He's either actually a loon, as he portrays himself to be, or he thinks he's channeling James Joyce. --Tim May