PM Johnson did just that. I’m sure he’s working on a smilar scheme to dodge UK taxes when he finaly ends his run at the Palladium, sorry, Westminster…
Often a side effect of incompetence, I think…
Fairly certain you can’t even renounce your citizenship if it would leave you stateless; only if you have dual citizenship.
And it is maddening when they talk about how they succeeded and how anyone who has not made as much money as them are obviously not smart, not trying hard enough or are just incompetent. They never seem to realize that all the infrastructure, laws and regulations that helped make their ‘success’ is necessary and without it everything would fall apart. I especially abhor financial people who make fortunes moving money around while creating chaos and pain for many other people and then turn around and moan about taxes. I have a feeling that a very large percentage of hard core libertarians are sociopaths.
Rich guy: “Redistribution of wealth never works!”
Society: “Redistribution of wealth is literally your entire job description.”
[CITATION NEEDED]
Please tell me that was either sarcasm or a dig at the military.
During world war ii, the navy paid homage to this philosophy
Despite looking awesome on the show Black Sheep Squadron and its record as both a fighter in WWII and close air support in Korea, the Corsair was not well regarded, due to its difficulty in landing on carriers.
Libertarianism is hierarchical though. These kind of schemes will fail because they have too many admirals on the ship, and few to no enlisted crew.
Nobody scrubs toilets in Galt’s Gulch. Not even in Rand’s book.
Didn’t Howard Roark dig ditches?
Different book. At least the movie version of that one had Gary Cooper.
Do any actual rich people do this, though? Like, I know that the “citizen of the world” thing is a thing with libertarians who own offshore gambling businesses and whatever. But actual legit business people would be really foolish to do this, because US citizenship is nearly impossible to get back, and not having it means its much much harder to travel in, live in, and do business in the US. All things rich people need to do a lot of.
I’m not certain about that, but it would be interesting to know. Officially the US does not recognize any dual citizenships, so I’m curious how this works. Like dual US/Canadian citizens are not considered Canadian in any way by the US. The pledge you have to take “renounces” all loyalty and whatever to other nations and flags, etc, etc. It’s all baloney of course, because they can’t actually take your Canadian passport or citizenship away. Canada recognizes the dual citizenship but the US does not (at least officially). This would seem to be at odds with the “can’t renounce unless you have another citizenship” rule, but a lot of these rules are internally inconsistent, so it wouldn’t surprise me.
I think that most people who buy foreign citizenship (and you can get some nice passports this way if you have enough money, including even Austria for like $9M or Malta at a steal for just $500k) do it as a secondary “back-up” citizenship just in case.
However, I do seem to remember reading a story many years back (it was probably even on BoingBoing…I think before the switch to Discord) about a rich guy who became a citizen of St. Kitts and Nevis and then renounced his US citizenship to avoid taxes. But then, when he tried to visit the US for a conference or something, they denied him a visa because he “did not have enough ties in his home country to show that he would ultimately return without overstaying.” I will keep searching for that article.
Company store at 8x the price, of course
You used the word requires. The LP will require exactly those things and that is why it will always fail.
Tina Turner has…
Dunno if I’d call her an asshole tho?
Yah, this is exactly what I would expect to happen. US citizenship is way too valuable to just give up for something as one-dimensional as tax avoidance. I think most actual rich businesspeople understand this, but I know a lot of the smaller, more huckster-y true-believer-soverign-citizen types certainly do this. A number of small (real) countries and (not so real) micronations sell citizenship to these clowns.
It’s not like the US just says “Oh well, you got us! Good one!” when you renounce. Now every time you try to visit for a business meeting, apply for a visa, etc, the USCIS is going to look at you and be like, “um, no, you had your chance, dumbass”. They’re not going to forget you.