Denmark would be my choice!!
But I'll FIGHT for the USA!!
I’m staying here but moving to a town with <3,000, in a county of <10,000, more than an hour from the nearest Interstate or city of any size. Many poor people, but with dignity, who work in agri and aquaculture. Town has about a dozen churches, no movie theater, an award winning charter school, etc.
But, there is certainly something to be said for just not being here while the USS Titantic is hitting the iceberg and watching it more as a cold spectator, of that makes sense.
Also, it's easier on our blood pressure being somewhere that you don't really understand their political system, don't really care and have little emotional investment.
bfl
More about Thailand to clear up posted misinformation. The Muslims are less than 3% of the population ... 96% Buddhist ..1% other... Muslim terrorism is only a problem in the extreme far south on the Malaysian border. There is next to NO problem with Muslims anywhere else in the entire country.
Thailand Visa - again - yes on most Visa types you have to leave the country several times a year - BUT this is not a big deal - Laos, Cambodia and Burma are only a bus ride away and most Expats make a ‘Visa Run’ with friends and make a sight seeing tour out of the effort.
I don’t recommend for anyone to consider living in places like Phuket and Pattaya and parts of Bangkok ... The ‘Tourista’ business has ruined it. If want a secluded site near (but not on the beach) I suggest Krabi, If you like more rural and mountains I suggest Khon Kaen, or Sakon Nakhon in the Isaan Region... You can rent land and farm.
Welcome to Mexarica .....
For those who want to stay and fight -— I suggest you join me an my Group - March on D.C. 2013 - along with a number of other groups we plan a sizable protest demonstration in D.C. on September 9th. Contact me and I will send you the Facebook address of my group and several others.
I very,very,*very* strongly wish to leave the United States.However,I don’t want to leave North America and I’d like to stay as close as possible to the place of my birth.The solution? Secession! The red states should secede and create a more prefect union.I’ll move to what is now known as North Carolina,Georgia,Tennessee...even West Virginia or Indiana.Let the blue states issue as many EBT cards,as many Obama Phones,as many marriage licenses to perverts,as many green cards as they wish.
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.
Look at their Tax Code via Goog;e etc and it is enough to make Steve Forbes Drool.
They haven't darn near taken over the Gen-Av airplane market by shear luck, tax code and smart engineers, all home grown all helped...
Rush is talking more ominous everyday IMHO.
I wonder if the day EIB 1 wheels go up not to return are not to far off...
As John Cazale said in “Dog Day Afternoon”: Wyoming.
If enough ex-pat Americans move to the same country, we could become the new “culture”.
Colonization doesn’t have to just happen to ‘merica these days.
How did the Confederates do in Brazil?
ping for later.
The wealthy Americans who live overseas are upset at a new set of intrusive foreign banking laws that requires foreign bank who have American depositors to issue extensive reports to the U.S. IRS... Some foreign banks don’t want to do this and are cutting back on accepting American clients. Plus Americans different from residents of many other nations have to pay U.S. Income Tax on foreign earnings ... So many are opting to drop their U.S. citizenship.
The one issue not discussed here much - is that many Americans are choosing to live overseas as a means of economic survival - it has just become too expensive to live in the USA on a modest retirement ... it has nothing with patriotism and more to do with survival .....