So for libertarians looking for a home away from home, what would I advise after three months wandering around the southern parts of Latin American?
1. Banking secrecy is on its way out everywhere, no matter what you’re told by expensive “relocation specialists,” escribanos, and lawyers.
2. Chile and Uruguay are the least corrupt countries. Argentina and Paraguay the most. Brazil is corrupt but not to the same degree.
3. If you’re looking for cheap, Bolivia or Paraguay fit the bill; none of the others really do. You can probably live as cheaply in some parts of America if you try.
4. Chile and Brazil are the best bets for investment and business. For the rest, it’s touch and go.
5. There are strong social movements in Latin America – and a good thing too. But that means there are also squatters’ rights and very tenant protective laws.
6. Monsanto and genetically modified food are everywhere. There’s not much of an organic movement, though it’s growing. It has to contend with soil depletion, agrifunds, asbentee landlords and tenant farmers who care only about making their quick buck and moving on.
7. Brazil is the best place to invest in housing. There are few other residential markets that are all that liquid, except in yuppie neighborhoods.
8. There’s no where in the world you can get away from vainglorious speculators, idiot marketers, shady operatives, the war on terror, Wall Street agitprop, and imperial sleaze-bucketry, all beating their drums, drooling and sneering, boasting, and stealing simultaneously.
9. I give the innocent, tranquil places of Latin America 4-5 years before the vultures descend to leave their soil raped, the beaches over-built with Miami style condos, drugs, marketing hype, porn, neg am loans, and all the rest of the barbaric vulgarity of so-called advanced civilization that profits only the very wealthy.
10. The best place to call home is the place where you have friends and family. Apart from a handful of dedicated humanists and activists, only people who share your race culture or faith will support you ultimately, not partisans – this much I’ve learned in the last ten years.
Between this one and Selling Survival, it’s begining to seem like – for most people – there is no option of flight, there is only fight.
Are you going back?
There is no option of flight even if you do leave the country..at least not if you’re middle class or below. Once you have mega millions, things become different, I suppose. You have access to protection, money managers…
Everyone else can pretty much be tracked down anywhere they “fled.”
But you do get away from certain things…incessant TV chatter, road rage, violent crime, PC…
that’s still plenty.
But I daresay there are lots of places in the US where it’s cheap, tranquil and remote right now. And in the US salaries are higher.
As for me, I figure no one can hit a moving target…
I figure no one can hit a moving target… That was funny, in an often true kind of way, however; sometimes certain targets can only be hit if and when they move… unlike the pumpkin we blew to bits on the shooting range this past weekend. I was amazed at the number of girls at the range shooting, I didn’t expect that.
Nobodies… what is little-more than a nobody? A step up from a nobody? Are they people who are less than mega millionaires in the black? At first i thought being a nobody only meant the lower-lower classes. I mean, it seems even Nicolas Cage could be a nobody, he is certainly what’s known as a FB:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/11/17/nicolas.cage.lawsuit/
From Uruguay to India, you must be doing some serious food extremes, a plus about traveling, you can eat a lot and not gain weight.