Free Your Mind, Vote with Your Feet

By James Guzman

If you are a person who assumes that the country you were born in is better than any other country on earth, then I would say no, you should not leave the United States. You have been afflicted with the hateful and divisive mental illness called nationalism, and there you should be quarantined.

To a true lover of liberty, one who has the will to explore and the social skills to deal with different kinds of people, I would answer with a resounding yes. Hell yes!

In order to have more liberty, you need to have the resources necessary to do whatever it is that you would like to do. Many people do not realize how well you can live outside the United States.

In a recent blog post I showed that you can rent a beautiful beachfront condo in Thailand, with all the amenities of a five-star hotel, for the same price as a dumpy apartment shared with three others on the outskirts of Austin. Further, technology has now made it easier than ever to earn money from anywhere on earth and use legal tax exemptions to dramatically increase your standard of living.

If you are able to live like a king, rather than being forced to live like a serf, wouldn’t that mean that you have more liberty?

Another huge part of liberty is obviously not living under a giant despotic government.

As Robert Higgs put it:

No other country has the means that the government of the United States does to carry out these horrifying surveillance programs and other measures of state tyranny.

I don’t think I need to remind anyone that the United States has by far the highest per capita prison population in the world. That fact alone disparages the myth of the United States being “the land of the free” or any kind of bastion of liberty.

Any libertarian should be completely outraged by the state of affairs in the United States. If you were outraged by the service of a restaurant what would you do? Would you continue to patronize the same restaurant or would you go where you were treated better? You should do that same with where you live. You should vote with your feet and go where you are valued.

Increased inter-connectivity is creating better systems that supersede nations. Floods of people worldwide are working together to use these networks to live amazing lives, rather than spinning their wheels fighting over chairs on a sinking ship.