The Freest Country?

[Tim May]

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