Internationally one will generally find that established, stable governments tend to run towards the authoritarian end of the spectrum. Civil liberties and basic property rights are subject to restriction in most developed, first-world countries.
Owning firearms, owning land, keeping the money you make, choosing how to raise your family, practicing your faith or lack thereof, voicing your opinions, enjoying your intoxicants of choice without paying five times their value in taxes or having your bedroom door kicked in by the local thugs in the police force, things like these are hard to come by.
Conversely, it’s easy enough to find unstable nations that don’t have much in the way of “official” taxation and regulation. Most of the time the unofficial “taxation” and “regulation” will more than make up for the lack of government oversight. Want to own a business? Better pay the local police for a “license” that doesn’t show up on any books anywhere, and don’t forget to pay “fees” to the local labor union and community leaders to keep your business from catching fire at night. God forbid you settle down in a nice tropical paradise right in time for the government to nationalize your property and your bank accounts. Understand that you may need to aim for the right balance between local corruption and centralized control.
In many areas of the world westerners are seen as money trees - just run up to them and shake them down for a bit of quick cash. It’s also comparatively harder to fly under the radar in some nations when your color, dress, or language loudly proclaims that you’re a foreign devil.
Human beings are tribal creatures, something most people in the west have both forgotten and take great pains daily to try to disbelieve. Outsiders have to manage to get along chiefly without the benefit of social support from the local community, without the allegiance of the dominant local groups, and without the social credit and trust that comes from being a “cousin”. If possible, try to ingratiate yourself into existing immigrant communities or faith-based communities which you might reasonably have some allegiance to. It’s better to be an Irishman living in the Irish communities in Boston than it is to be the proverbial lone Irishman living in Haiti.
Never, ever forget that countries are temporary and fleeting artificial creations. Invasions, revolutions, coups, demographic displacement, and religious displacement are some of the reasons that the map of the world gets redrawn every couple of years.
That’s a lot of unpleasant social and legal terrain you’ll need to navigate around.
You can improve your odds of living a long, happy, productive life by following a few general rules.
First, try to maintain as much financial independence as possible - don’t place all of your money in the government run banks, things like checking accounts, savings accounts, retirement accounts, these are like piggy banks for unscrupulous governments (re, all governments). Read up on the economic troubles in Argentina to get an idea of what can happen to your bank accounts and your IRA when the government has bills to pay. Further note, currencies can and do fail - don’t neglect to have a reserve of foreign currencies set aside, or some assets in specie. If the local currency turns in to so much toilet paper over night, it helps to have a well-respected and recognized international currency.
Despite the ever present risk of robbery, it’s often a good idea to have some hard cash on hand for emergencies. Temporary disruptions of goods and services should be expected the world over, it’s naive and simply wrong-headed to assume that you can walk into a bank or hit up an ATM any time of the day or night whenever you need to. Likewise, during times of civil unrest or in the early stages of a government transition, what you have on you and in your pockets may be the only things you’ll have that will help you escape or subsist.
Having multiple sources of revenue adds a level of security as well. What would you do if your pension checks, or your social security checks, just stopped coming one day? Professional knowledge and marketable skills are certainly easily transportable and hard to steal, and the right ones can keep you from going hungry or ending up in a refugee camp.
Consider maintaining some degree of physical mobility. As a general rule you don’t want all of your eggs in one basket, and that rule can encompass having a second little property in another nation to escape to if your current nation changes radically over night. Likewise, if you’re sailing around the world on your dream boat, don’t discount the possibility that some corrupt little government official will appropriate your yacht and leave you stranded on shore - have a backup plan.
Research the nations you plan on frequenting! Understand both the written and the unwritten laws of a nation. Too many people in the anglosphere assume that the rules are written down, and that anything not written down is A-OK. A hell of a lot of what passes for governance in the world goes on off the books.
Look at the history of the nation to understand how its borders came to be, what its relations with its neighbors are, what peoples and cultures and religions control the various political and geographic units, and pay special note to any long-simmering ethnic or cultural conflicts that spark into genocidal violence every 50 to 100 years. All cultures and tribes are not created equal, and some cultures and tribes are so incompatible that you can bet good money that they’ll be warring with each other until kingdom come (or one wipes out the other).
Your general strategy will be different whether you’re planning on retiring some place, whether you plan on living and working in another nation, whether you want to raise a family and create a legacy that will last for generations, or whether you plan on traveling while in semi-retirement/semi-work. Do your research carefully with an eye towards your real needs. Check and see if there’s a thriving expat community living there already. These people may be a wealth of information for you.
Develop good street sense. Most of the world doesn’t have the benefit of huge, professional, well-funded and mostly non-corrupt law enforcement agencies. Kidnapping is big business in many countries. Home invasions as well. Sometimes you’ll find the local law enforcement “moonlighting” in these occupations. Staying away from drugs, steering clear of revolutionary movements (even of the ideological kind), avoiding prostitutes, not gambling, and keeping a low profile will help avoid some trouble, but you’re still probably going to appear wealthier and easier to knock over than the locals. The world isn’t Mayberry.
Check your illusions at the border, keep your head up and your eyes & ears open, be flexible, be mobile, be realistic, be cynical, have backup plans to your backup plans.
I concur, and might I add this is the kind of discussions that are needed these days.
First of all, I’d like to accent the point that jameslalor made about tribalism; where for that reason, I had thought of Liberia being a last resort if needed.
The reader is of course saying, “Liberia?? you must be nuts!”. Here me out.
First of all, I’m black. I don’t consider myself and African -American by any means, nor have I ever set foot on the continent. But I figure if I gotta bail in a hurry, better to run to a place where they look like you, speak the same language, and you have something to offer them, rather that living off of them.
[Sidebar: for the little fed-lings out there reading this saying “Aha! He’s going to Liberia!”, don’t go high-fiving yourself yet, as my final destination will be a much better place, and I’m confident you’ll never get there(just keep reading). But I digress...]
What I said above is important for anyone thinking of relocating outside the U.S. You have to be ready to adapt to the laws (or lack thereof), language and culture of what is around you unless you have enough force to tame the place to your linking. If not, you’re just like the illegal immigrants that (here’s the shocker) no one wants in their country anymore. Thus making the American government currently one of the stupidest on earth for actually wanting more in. This alone makes our downfall imminent (just ask Rome).
I have thought about this alot, and have decided that although I am not yet a senior citizen, there will be conflict on this soil (actually, it’s already begun) and if it is to be won by our side, it will not be done during our lifetimes. At best, I figure we may lay the spritual, social and communicative ground work, our children and grandchildren will wage the war, and their children may finish it. I believe we should think about this as a war for the survival of freedom that will last beyond the next generation.
With that in mind, I would not hold anyone at fault for moving their family offshore. If you are thinking of may just you and your spouse, ask yourself could you be a safe house or in a strategic position to help others in the future?
I’m thinking well beyond mere guns money and margaritas on the beach.
When things really begin to blow up, there will be American refugees. Like in the SW US today, illegals are flooding the border, knowing there’s a social network for them. Where’s the social network for the ex-pats?
Lastly, allow me to think outside the box when it comes to the possibility of a secession movement: If Alaska, The Yukon, British Columbia, Alberta, and the 4 U.S. states in the NW corner all joined forces, you would only have 3 minor problems: Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland. If those cities well um... didn’t have a say in the matter, the population there could vote themselves into the largest country on earth with warm water ports, plenty of raw materials, etc.
There’s a mindset among the people up that way. Kinda frontiersmen like. You’ll need that to survive.
If the people there even showed the willingness to defend it, Canada would fall in short order. Washington would be force to act with force, but I would simply convince them that the center of the resistance is located in Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland.
Bottom line is, “when you’re burned, you’re not going anywhere”, as they say. And I’m pretty fried from fighting this battle for years. But I will do my part with prayer, words and deeds to help light the way for the next generations out of the darkness. We’ll all be dead and gone, but our posterity will remember us for what we did for them - or didn’t do. What happens between now and then, is up to each one of us.