MARCH/APRIL 2014
STEVEN BODZIN
... Welcome to Galt’s Gulch Chile, a libertarian refuge from the coming economic, social, and political collapse of the United States. The would-be free-market utopia, named after the mountain redoubt of the protagonist of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, is taking advance payments (Bitcoins gladly accepted) for parcels on its 11,000 acres.
Joining Johnson, the project’s managing partner, are three prospective buyers: a retiree from Oregon, a California-based expert in moving assets offshore, and another retiree who doesn’t want to give much in the way of personal data. “Oh, the NSA’s here too?” he says the first time he sees my audio recorder. The men talk of a coming financial meltdown caused by the Federal Reserve, followed by a Homeland Security police state. They’re ready to get out with their silver, guns, and organic honey — but not quite ready to sacrifice fast internet, access to an international airport, and a time zone convenient for Skyping with the doomed sheeple back home. Throw in low taxes, privatized social security, and a Mediterranean climate, and you have Chile ...
Down at a ranch house in the valley, we join Galt’s Gulch Chile’s top promoter, Jeff Berwick, who’s mingling with dozens of investors and potential customers. Acre-and-a-quarter lots start at $48,500. Berwick writes the Dollar Vigilante financial newsletter and appears frequently on investment talk shows, telling people to get out of North America ASAP. “I expect a complete monetary system collapse in the next 5 or 10 years,” he told Canada’s CBC ...
If Galt’s Gulch isn’t your scene, Freedom Orchard is right next door. Its founder is John Cobin, a genial expat who cranks out an endless stream of articles, op-eds, and episodes of his Red Hot Chile podcast in which he extols the country’s low taxes, rigid anti-abortion laws, and traditional gender roles. Cobin ran for Congress in South Carolina in 2006 but was arrested for domestic violence days before the vote. (The charges were dropped.) His vice president of international sales, an organic farmer named Frank Szabo, lost a race for sheriff in New Hampshire in 2012 after saying he wouldn’t rule out use of deadly force against abortion doctors. He later apologized and said he abhors violence ...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/02/libertarian-expat-communities-chile/
= new reply since forum marked as read