Aspiring Expats Should Look No Further
At Freedom Fest this year, there were a series of lectures about foreign countries with accommodations for financial protection. The group that conducted these controversial chats is referred to as the Sovereign Society and they specialize in consulting expats. According to their website, “The Sovereign Society’s highly qualified Council of Experts, consist of carefully chosen professionals located in select tax and asset havens around the world. [Their] experts have spent their careers discovering the best global investments, the safest tax havens and the most secure devices in which to protect … assets.”
If President Obama’s agenda to “Europeanize” America comes to fruition, you might as well go where the baguette and cheese tastes better and the banking is a bit more discrete. Many of the people in the audience seemed to agree that America just isn’t as free as it used to seem. I’d like to be able to refute this, but I also just stumbled upon an article about how, by dying in a year when there is no federal estate tax, George Steinbrenner potentially saved his heirs a 55% estate tax on his assets – or a tax bill of about $600 million. This is, of course, on top of the taxes he paid his entire life.
Is the Sovereign Society a group looking to orchestrate some sort of Galt’s Gulch? Maybe that’s an über romanticized version of it, but the metaphor of alienating “the producers” and “voting with [feet]” can account for their popularity.(“When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” – Benjamin Franklin, on Barack Obama.)
American citizens are the descendants of political and religious refugees. If the States don’t retain their status as a haven for autonomy, I see a bright future for the expatriation industry. If you truly, truly cannot bear the tax burden in the United States, I suggest you take a look at these folks. My New York snobbery, however, has rendered me unable to consider living in Panama or Liechtenstein over Manhattan – regardless of the price tag.
Maybe Singapore, though….