Six years ago I joyously broke into the world of libertarian financial publishing. A couple months ago I barely escaped with my life. I'm still breathing, but slowly rebuilding my bank account and piecing back together my soul. I got paid to write and to explore the ideas that I loved...and to travel!...but I also had to sell some ideas that cost me some sleep.
At my first writing job, I used flowery prose about liberty and free exchange to get people to click on links. On average I would append every 500 words with a linked request to "click here to learn more." These links led to odious "long copy" designed to capture the attention of people too old for the internet to have taught them that the investment world is hopelessly jiggered and rigged against them by central banking and corporatism. But I got paid not to tell them that they don't need fancy schemes to protect and grow their wealth. Gold, silver, Bitcoin. There. That would have saved them at least $30 in annual subscription fees to any number of libertarian-smelling financial newsletters.
My next gig had me trump up expatriation as the answer to the domestic oppression of the US. The answer to life in the growing police state of the NSA and Doctor Obama: countries where the governments cause even more wealth abortions with regulations and taxes and where the young people are even more in love with socialism. I was even freer to talk about freedom than in my last gig (where freedom was the fig leave covering up the sleazy 70's era used-car salesmanship)...but I was a lot less free regarding my choices when it came to my lifestyle and where to live it. It generates a lot of dissonance when one sells the idea of expatriation but really doesn't want to do it. And company management never let me forget it.
But hey, even if things really are better for Anglo-Americans (that includes Canada...except for that nasty, little, tribal socialist Francophone portion to the east) in Latin America, it takes more than a little reptilian disregard of other human beings to allow one to enjoy greater freedom in the midst of real estate where the local government beats out the US government in the category of pillaging its human livestock.
I was accused by the company top brass of having the plantation mentality one might expect of a descendant of African chattel slaves...because I was so uncomfortable with the idea of leaving the comforts of the master I knew for a frightening freedom elsewhere. But I think what I was merely exhibiting was the desire of a normally functioning human brain for the familiar. Still I tried living in other countries in order to toe the company line. At that point I was no stranger to living in new places; I'd spent the previous two years bouncing around the US and trying different cities on for size. But there is a different and discomfiting tension to living in regions with a different language and culture and whose inhabitants are various degrees of Mestizo instead of the Irish, English, and German mutthood to which even a US-based negro gets accustomed.
It has always amazed me just how eager white folks are to "go native". White people across the political spectrum seem to love visiting -- and even living in -- poor places full of brown people and bereft of plumbing. While the average person can't tell because of my newscast anchor accent, I hail from one of those poor places full of brown and black people and have every desire to stay in the First World. Plus, it really just is cooler to be the only white guy in a brown place where you don't speak the language than be the only black guy in a brown place where you don't speak the language. Anyone who doesn't get that is just embarrassingly ignorant of racial dynamics concerning who runs the world and who is considered a bunch of impressively sexually endowed but otherwise incompetent cartoons by the rest of it.
So I fled back to Minneapolis and ground my toes into the Minnesotan soil, determined never to leave. By then, however, my attempts to pretend that I was expatriatable had led to some decisions that wrecked my life in the Twin Cities. I'd given up the little house that I'd hope to die in and all my possessions had been sold off for pennies on the dollar. I had nothing and my sweet deal on a sweet little place to live was no more.
I was unable to enjoy being back in the Midwestern urban comfort for which I'd longed. I was angry as ever at a planet still so thoroughly infected by state violence and the diseased mind virus that kept people believing in it. But I was almost equally disillusioned with the liberty "movement" and the gimmickry of its most visible media. And I was broke.
It took some months to find a new balance. I had to learn to love what was good in my state-afflicted life again. And to appreciate the good in the liberty movement. Not getting paid to write anymore was the best possible thing for me. I was able to distill both internally and publicly what was good in the movement and what works. The non-aggression principle, property rights, gold and Bitcoin. The latter two are ways to protect your wealth from the predation of the state and its violent monopoly on the money that represents what you've earned. The first two are the guiding principles that simplify economics and whose applications eliminate both poverty and war. I saved the best for last: peaceful parenting.
Peaceful parenting is the only way to inoculate coming generations from the mind virus of statism. This simple idea will change the world. We won't change it with political action. Moving to hearts of darkness and hiding money in foreign accounts is expensive and often uncomfortable rear guard action. Writing articles and books will not change a single heart steeped in the religion of statism. The best (by far) that we can do is to live boldly right where we are. And as the bad ideas die with the old lost brains that cling to them, we make sure that those who replace them have better ideas. We teach them negotiation instead of coercion before they can form complete sentences. We nurture the natural born philosophers in each new, tiny human to which we have access.
And we take advantage of the market in the form of the internet lowering the cost on all the other stuff like non-inflationary currency. No need to go live in a slightly different fascistic socialist state with a different language and less infrastructure. There is nowhere to flee. And that's the good news. Live boldly where you are. Ignore the state where you can. Pay the bastards off when you have to. And teach the newest replacement components of our species how to speak the language of voluntary transaction.
May you, too, find peace right where you are. And may you never have to "click here to find out more" again.
Regards,
Gary Gibson
