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April 14, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
23:54
2359 Expatriation and The Weirdness of History - An Interview with Bobby Casey
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All right.
We're live.
Hello, it's Stefan Waller, VitaMade Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
I am here with the great and semi-shaven Bobby Casey, who is running this great conference here in Belize, GlobalEscapeHatch.com.
And thanks again for the invitation.
We're going to have a little chat about expatriation, the weirdness of history, and how much things have changed.
And people, you know, there's this great scene in 1984 where Winston Smith goes into this bar and he tries to find some old guy who remembers what life was like before the revolution and he can't.
Because they're all so old they can't really remember now anymore.
People have forgotten just how weird things have gotten over the last 100 years ago.
No passport, no visas, no work permits, no green cards.
You could just go someplace and go work there and then come back if you wanted.
And it's weird, as travel has gotten easier, travel has become more restricted.
In some ways, I almost envy just take, you know, a steamship across and go do whatever you want in the 18th century.
And so I think what's happened to me, at least, is you sort of think, you feel like you've got this electronic dog collar on called paperwork.
It's so much hassle to go and get all the other paperwork and all that kind of stuff, second passport.
Opening a bank account is real easy in another country.
As you pointed out in your talk yesterday, who goes to their bank anymore?
It doesn't really matter where it is in the world.
What are your thoughts about how difficult it is, how easy it is, how necessary it is to get yourself some legs and stretch beyond your borders?
Well, so I'll start off two things.
One, I mean, as you know, I'm an anarcho-capitalist, more or less anarchist, and that's why I don't shave.
I'm rebelling against the razor.
So that is my rebellion.
Right.
That's how I push against this thing.
You're on the non-cutting edge of social thinking.
Exactly.
I also want to thank you for having me on your show, and even more importantly, thanks for coming and speaking at our conference.
It's my pleasure.
We meet some really great people here to chat with.
We've got a pretty eclectic mix here.
We've got some really cool speakers, and honestly we've got some really great attendees as well.
Some of these attendees are doing some unbelievable things.
I'm allergic to small talk and I have not had one dull conversation since I got here.
And I hugely appreciate that.
That's great.
No sports, no weather, not even much politics.
Mostly just great ideas.
I love talking about politics, but just because I hate it.
Just a rant on how to overcome that parasitic influence on our life.
Anyway, now I had too much of an intro.
Your question was...
Oh yeah, just around people's inertia about their borders and this feeling that it's just, oh, it takes years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a second passport.
It's too much of a hassle and my friends are all here.
Doug Casey's talking about some of that sort of stuff, but I know you've got some good perspectives on that as well.
Yeah, it's a weird situation, right?
We were just discussing...
Passports didn't even exist until about 100 years ago.
And it's...
If the state weren't trying to own us, right?
I mean, it's almost like you're...
Your title, your deed, right?
Your birth certificate and your passport is like your deed to the state.
So 100 years ago, we didn't need a passport to travel.
We just jumped on a boat and we went where we wanted to go.
We wanted to do work.
You and I were conducting business, let's say, 150 years ago.
You know, I'm doing something for you.
You pay me in whatever method that is.
Maybe we barter.
Maybe you pay me with silver coin or gold coin, specie.
And that's the way it works.
Now, the world has evolved.
I mean, we've become...
I mean, the whole world has become one giant state.
We have little pockets of states, right?
But it's just, it's more or less we're one big state.
You mentioned 1984, quite possibly the scariest book ever written.
I wish it was still in the fiction department.
Right, right.
Now it's moved into the documentary section.
Almost to history.
Almost.
Right.
Yeah, so, I mean, it's...
1984 is a scary situation.
So, you mentioned the guy from 1984 who can't remember, right?
Yeah, he goes to this bar and says, what was life before the revolution?
Because all they get is propaganda about what life was like before the revolution.
And it's the same thing we have now.
What was life like without...
Passports.
And they say, well, there were robber barons, and they stole everything from you, and there were evil capitalists who made you work in the salt mines of Kessel 14 hours a day.
And there's all these stories about the Wild West, and there were gunslingers out there shooting everyone up.
I mean, the level of propaganda people have about the 19th century is really quite depressing, when it was, in fact, the century with the longest period of Western European peace, 100 years.
End of the Napoleonic Wars, 1815, started World War I, 1914, 100 years of peace.
Unprecedented.
Tripling of the standard of living, increasing the amount of calories that the workers got by two or three times.
Massive falls in infant mortality and huge increase in lifespan.
Incredible, never-before-seen renaissance of an improvement in the human condition and all we ever hear about is all the, you know, like there were nothing but pirates running the world and all.
It's just terrible.
Well, you know, I mean, the Wild West movies, right, the old Western movies, they do a good job of making us think it was just a gun-slinging country.
Until the sheriff and the government came by, and then order was restored.
Like, thieves, they don't go to the frontier.
Even when I was a kid, I'm like, if you're a thief, you want to stay in the city.
Some frontier town.
That's where you find your money, right?
Who are you going to steal from in the frontier?
A farmer?
Are you going to steal his horses?
And plus their arms.
Yeah, you're going to steal a farmer's horses?
Good luck with that, brother.
But early 19th century, early mid-19th century, western U.S., if you look at that, if you really study, I've read some research reports on that, it's actually one of the most economically productive times in History.
And there was virtually no state.
Sure, there was little towns that maybe had a sheriff, but the sheriff had really no power.
I mean, he was there more or less to uphold property rights and enforce any violent action.
Yeah, if there was disputes about claims and all of that, like the new land people got, if there were overlaps, he'd deal with that.
Other than that, he didn't do much.
He couldn't call for backups, really.
Yeah, there was no backup for him to call.
There was no hunting you down for unpaid taxes.
There really weren't any taxes to be hunted down for.
It's an interesting time.
You know my business.
We do asset protection and offshore planning.
Basically, we help people internationalize their life and internationalize the financial aspect of their life.
Quite frankly, We didn't live in the world we live in today.
There would be absolutely no need for what I'd do.
I say I wouldn't be in this business.
You'd probably be in diversification because people would want geographically dispersed investments.
Just, you know, in case there's weather-related stuff, massive storms wreck some economy somewhere.
You just want to be diversified from that standpoint.
And also, of course, I mean, even in a free society, there'll be different pockets of intellectual activity and, you know, someone's going to have a great idea over here and if you're all invested over here.
So I think there'd be some geographical dispersion, but there wouldn't be all of this protect yourself from the, you know, hooks of the state coming to rip into your fortunes.
Yeah, well, you wouldn't, you know, we talk a lot about getting second passports and that sort of thing, because nowadays, a second passport is an insurance policy.
I mean, you're Canadian, I'm American, but as an American, it's not as big of a deal for you, but it won't be long.
I mean, Canada pretty much kind of follows that path.
I'm lucky enough to have an EEC passport, so I'm okay with that.
Yeah, you have an Irish passport too, right?
So, I mean, you're a dual citizen, and that Irish passport is a great travel document.
It gives you free access to the 27 member states anytime you want.
I guess, or maybe 28, I can't remember if Croatia's signed on yet or not.
But, you know, we talk about these things, but really, the only reason we need this document, which is kind of a...
You know, it's kind of a funny thing because I would need this second passport to protect myself against the first state I'm enslaved to.
So I become enslaved to another state so I can play one state against the other, right?
I discussed this in my presentation, the hotel analogy, right?
I'm staying in the Marriott, 200 bucks a night, great breakfast, great bedding, great shower.
I'm very happy, 200 bucks a night.
Well, now the Hyatt across the street, We'll do everything the Marriott does for $150 a night.
I'm going to pack my bags and move to the Hyatt.
Well, it's this competitive environment.
Now, we have to spread our slavery, let's call it.
You look for where the blows are released and try to get there.
Well, the government.
You're looking for the government.
That's the least intrusive in your life.
So you're trying to take advantage of the piece of the puzzle.
As mobility increases, there is, as you mentioned, some competition to lower the noose around your neck or to loosen it a little bit.
I'm always surprised every time I come to these kinds of conferences because you pointed out it's almost 40% Corporate tax in the U.S. The marginal top rate is 39.6.
The U.S. is winning, right?
Because we're number one in the world.
Yay!
And you know all these idiots on TV and in government are saying, well, okay, it's 39.6, but you can do this and this and this.
Nobody pays an effective Tax rate at 39.6.
Maybe not on that line item of tax, right?
What about the other line items of tax?
What about excess tax?
What about import duties?
What about sales tax?
What about, as you pointed out, when you're trying to use a country to do business in, you're going to look at the tax rate.
And if someone says, oh, don't worry, it's lower than that, you're like, well, how much is it going to cost me, and what risk am I putting myself in for it to get that tax rate down?
More importantly, to me, is your cost of compliance.
So, I owned a company I sold, I guess, five years ago.
We were a decent-sized company.
I had a...
About 50 or 60 employees and about 900 contractors, 1099 contractors.
And we spent, I estimated my office staff spent at least 30% of their time dealing with state compliance issues, state or federal.
I mean, we did business in 40...
44, 45 states in the US. So we had 45 states plus the federal government.
We had compliance issues to deal with, plus all the different agencies like OSHA and the Insurance Commission.
We had patent office and all this crap that we had to deal with.
It got to the point where I started thinking, I can't even take the time to take care of my customer because I'm taking care of some stupid government office to prove to them that I'm taking care of my customer.
And what's even more terrifying is you absolutely do not know for sure that you're compliant.
I mean, you can certainly hire the best advice and all that, but there are so many regulations out there.
I think Tom Woods, I can't remember who it was, wrote a book about this, that everything you do is illegal.
You know, that we all, wittingly or not, you know, I mean, you certainly, everybody does their best who's in business, but you can never be 100% sure because there may be some regulation somewhere that someone just decides to spring on you and nobody knew about it.
I mean, that's the alarming part as well.
Well, it's absolutely true.
I mean, I'm 100% convinced, at least in the U.S., the U.S. tax code is designed to make 311 million criminals.
Right.
I'm absolutely convinced.
I mean, it's impossible.
I forget the numbers now.
You just know them off the top of my head.
But it's something like, what is it?
The U.S. tax code has something like...
16 million words in the U.S. tax code.
It's more than Shakespeare's life work.
Oh yeah, much more.
This is the U.S. tax code.
And you take a country like Estonia, whose U.S. tax code is like 40,000 words.
This is the 22% on everything you make over, what, 600 euros?
Yeah, it's a 21% flat income tax on earned income, sorry, 21% flat tax on earned income above 600 euros per month.
They have no corporate tax, so if you had a company there earning a million euros a year, if you were the owner of the company, you'd pay yourself a 100,000 euros salary, you'd pay 21% of Well, 600 euros is 7,200 euros total for the year, so you'd pay 21% of that, what, 92,800 euros per month of income you have.
You have no corporate tax, so you wouldn't pay any corporate tax on the 900,000.
And Paul, one of our other speakers and I, he knows the original Prime Minister of Estonia from, you know, When the Soviet Union fell, they were having a chat and basically he said he didn't know anything about economics and he said, why do I need to know anything about economics?
It's just common sense stuff.
We need the smallest possible government we could have to run it in the most minimal way.
It's possible.
We don't want to copy the Western governments.
This is 20 years ago, and this is coming out of communism.
What did he say about Milton Friedman?
Yeah, you're right.
He said, let's just read Milton Friedman books and copy that.
Because the communists hated Milton Friedman, so whatever they hated has got to be pretty good.
Thank God they didn't hate Paul Krugman.
Well, isn't it?
I mean, it's one of these tragic ironies of history that the West poured trillions of dollars into fighting socialism and communism in the Eastern Bloc countries, and now, economically, they're far freer than the West.
It's like, let's give one kidney, but not two.
Now they've got both kidneys and we're on dialysis.
That's correct.
That's one of the reasons I live in Eastern Europe.
I live in Latvia.
Everybody says, why do you live in Latvia?
It's got to be a really rough place.
I always joke, it is way safer there.
And I lived in a, not a small town, but a medium-sized town in North Carolina.
I would never, ever let my teenage daughter walk to the cinema at night, at 10 o'clock at night in North Carolina.
But in Riga, I'm like, yeah, have a good night.
No problem.
I've never even seen a bar fight.
Right.
Go to a bar anywhere in the U.S. or probably even Canada.
It happens.
I've been there.
I've seen them.
All the time.
From a safe distance.
From a safe philosophical distance.
What are you guys doing?
Let me sketch out of here.
I've never even seen it.
You almost never see police.
I probably haven't told you this, but their whole parking system, their paid parking system in the city is privately run.
Oh, really?
Except for government buildings, but aside from that, it's all privately managed.
Street parking.
You pay the meter and the guy runs it.
So the meter mate actually works for a private company in Riga.
Almost everything is privately managed there.
Things we can only dream of.
Right.
But everybody says, oh, how can you live there?
It must be awful.
Good.
You stay here.
Come see.
You stay here.
So what's next for the conference circuit for you?
You have something coming up in the fall, if that's right.
Is that right?
Well we do, my company, Global Escape Hatch, we do two, well that's our conference business.
We do two conferences a year.
We'll do a spring and a fall.
Well, you know, so we try to do them about six months apart.
So we'll do one in September.
Right now, I think we're going to do it in Panama.
I think we're going to go back to Panama.
I'm talking to one of your speakers this afternoon about investing in Panamanian real estate.
I hope he's going to come with a hat.
I think that's just got to be the Panama hat.
It's got to happen for the interview.
What's that?
Oh, right, right, right.
You're talking about Brian?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think we'll probably go back there.
I mean, I speak at a lot of conferences.
I'm speaking at one and In May, in Antigua.
Actually, I'm speaking at Freedom Fest.
Oh, great.
We'll see each other there then, too.
I'll be there.
I was talking to Mark.
He was talking about doing an Escape from America panel with me and Jeff Berwick and Doug Casey.
That would be good.
I thought that would be kind of interesting to do.
So, you know, I do a few conferences a year.
I mean, we host two, right?
And then you go speak at them, yeah.
And the one in Panama, is it going to be globalescapehatch.com?
Globalescapehatch.com, yeah.
So right now, globalescapehatch.com, it's all information about this one.
So the speakers that are up there, the info page, the updates, all that stuff is about this one.
Yeah.
Probably next week when things calm down a little bit, Steve and I, my business partner Steve, Steve and I will probably pull that stuff down and just, it'll be blank stuff, you know, coming soon, input coming soon, that sort of thing.
And I just wanted to mention too, for people who are thinking of these kinds of conferences, what I really like about your approach to conferences is it's very social, so you're not just going there, sitting, and then going home.
So you're socializing, going out for drinks.
Sunday you've got the speakers available for people to have private conversations with, whatever they want to talk about.
So it's a consulting mall in a kind of way that you can go and get information that you need.
You can't get it from any other medium.
Because, you know, even if this was recorded and put on YouTube, you could watch it.
But that's really, to me, the essence of conferences, the conversations that you can have with people outside of the presentation.
Presentations are great.
But that's something that, you know, if you're doing conferences, try that approach.
Because it's really great, I think, for people to get more personal information.
Well, we have a couple of...
For me, I don't know.
I mean, this conference...
So our core business, as you know, we do the asset protection offshore planning.
The website, globalwealthprotection.com.
That's our core business.
So we help clients internationalize their financial life.
And we use tools like trust and foundations and offshore companies, bank accounts.
We help them, you know, find the right investments that they're looking for.
And the conference business grew from that because we've got to...
A pretty decent-sized following because we publish a free newsletter, too.
So if you're interested in the newsletter, you guys can sign up on the Global Wealth Protection site.
So we publish a free newsletter between me or Steve or Paul or Kelly or Adam or those guys.
We write two to five articles per week, and we have a pretty big following of people that We're trying to educate people, right?
We're trying to educate people on internationalization and how to achieve freedom through internationalization because in this state society we live in, we can fight it ideologically, but we still have to live in it, right?
And so we have to live within the realm of reality at this point.
And so the education piece, the conference business, grew from the desire to educate our followers on These strategies, and like you said, it's so much better to get there and, you know, we'll be sitting down at the beach in a couple hours having beers, chatting with our toes in the sand.
That beats the hell out of having a Skype chat with me from, you know, a thousand miles apart, right?
So it's a very unique situation, but so I have a few, like, requirements, and the conference business evolved out of our desire to To help educate our readers and people that are really interested in these types of things.
But also, I guess a lot of it came from my own core values.
As you can tell, I'm very social.
To me, the most important thing, professionally and personally, I had done my entire adult life is network with people smarter than me.
My dad always told me, and my dad was a very smart businessman, he always said, always hire people smarter than you and they'll help take care of your business.
An extension of that is to network and do business and have friends that raise your level.
They pull you up.
I don't know if you saw, I wrote an article earlier this week.
You're the average of the five people, your five most closest friends or five most closest associations.
If all your friends make 50 grand a year and they go on vacation at Disney World once a year for a week and they go to work 8 to 5 and watch SportsCenter and Mother Yard on the weekend, that's probably what you do.
Right.
Right?
I mean, that's going to be your life.
But what if your friends travel the world?
What if they talk about interesting things?
What if they're building hotels in Panama?
What if they own an offshore bank in Belize?
What if they have...
You know, resilient community or sustainable communities in Chile.
That's a whole different sphere of influence you're surrounding yourself with.
And so the conference is the extension of my desire to associate network with very interesting people.
Not just the speakers, but the attendees as well.
And we build that conference around networking.
We want great speakers, and I think we have great speakers.
But we don't want, like you said, we don't want the conference room to close at 5 o'clock and everybody scatter and go do their own thing.
Or we scatter at 4, right?
We scatter at 4, but we're back together at the bar at 5, having cocktails.
Today, we meet at 5 for drinks.
We get on the boat dock right in front of the bar, which is...
Cool as shit, right?
Yeah, it really is.
We're literally walking from the bar down the boat dock, and we're getting on boats, going to a casino and having dinner at a pool.
You can't beat that.
And we're all going to be hanging out, talking business, talking life, having interesting conversations.
It's much better that way.
It certainly helps keep me out of...
I think most people have a tendency to just kind of fall into a bit of a rut.
And if you socialize with people who are making very different choices than most people in the world, and I think very productive and positive choices, it kind of kicks you out of the rut and reminds you of the past.
Like I had a guy, when I was doing the 9 to 5 thing, when I was more of an entrepreneur.
I'm an entrepreneur.
I wish it was 9 to 5.
A guy I was working with...
No, after I sold the company, I did some work, just regular old work.
And a guy was like, oh, you know, I think I'm going to leave this job.
I'm going to spend a couple of years, so I'm going to get a sailboat and go sail around the Caribbean for a couple of years.
Because, you know, that would be fun for me.
And I just remember thinking, like, wow, you know, I love being around people who make those kinds of choices.
It helps reinforce your own broad-mindedness.
It helps stokes your own courage for somehow overcoming all the stupid petty obstacles that bureaucrats put in your way.
And so I think being around people like this is really, really important for that.
So thanks, Bobby.
I, of course, appreciate the invitation.
Thank you, sir.
I would point the camera out the window in here in Belize, but it would make all my northern listeners just spontaneously weep.
All the Canadians would start deleting your podcast.
That jerk.
So yeah, globalwealthprotection.com and globalescapehatch.com.
Check this stuff out.
It's really good.
Thanks, Stephen.
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