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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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As someone else mentioned, if shit hits the fan, they will not let him live the good life while their fake country collapses.

I think a point could be made that all countries are fake.

Also, the number of countries which let billionaires live the good life while collapsing is just about zero. There might be some principled libertarians who would feel compelled to respect the property rights of the rich even in the middle of a collapse, but the average policeman or soldier is not going to watch his family starve while the rich feast.

In democracies, runaway inflation will reliably cause the election of extremist candidates. And dictatorships are even worse -- dictators as a rule do not believe in respecting human rights, so they have no principled reason to respect the property rights of the rich. Sometimes they even expropriate and imprison rich foreigners when they are not collapsing even though it might seem in their long term interests to not do so.

Your best bet in an authoritarian state is probably having close personal ties to the dictator (e.g. through marriage, Crusader Kings style), but even then there is always the danger of an internal coup. It seems hard for foreigners to have collectively enough political clot that the generalissimo feels that he can't throw one under the bus from time to time.

If I was a billionaire, I would still bet on the US. The 1% class is very good at looking out for their own interests. Ideally, I would recommend staying out the culture war and partisan politics. Let the peasants fight about affirmative action or abortion, the rich can thrive both under GWB and Obama.

Your example of Dubai imprisoning rich foreigners for no reason is a bad example. Albert Douglas's son Wolfgang had a company that accumulated ~2.5 million pounds of debt in Dubai. So from Dubai's perspective, they were dealing with a clan of criminal fraudsters who stole from their country and then tried to run away.

The numerous english facing websites and articles dedicated to the release of Albert imply to me that the Douglas family could easily pay the debt but chose media pressure on Dubai over human rights as a reasonable strategy to get Albert released. I suspect they just paid the debts owed after 4 years of Albert getting tortured.

In Western countries debt can't be transferred between family members, but obviously Dubai has a different opinion on the matter.

I will grant you that just from the facts I have read, it is entirely possible that Wolfgang's company accumulated the debt through straightforward fraud and they are now living in luxury due to their ill-gotten gains.

However, I do not think this is overly likely. I surmise that the local law makes a distinction between fraud and debt, and it would be strange to only charge the latter if the former applied.

The more central possibility seems to be that his company either got unlucky or got played. Suppose you are a local noble, and you desire the company of a foreigner. You know your legal system works in practice, against whom laws get enforced and who is untouchable. So you get him to accept a contract with a local government, and then subcontract a significant amount to a locally owned company. The subcontractor does not deliver. Now he is a debtor to the government, and a creditor to some local noble. The court system is not going to send a local to debtors prison for a debt owed to a foreigner, but it will gladly send the foreigner to prison -- he might have offshore assets he could still cough up to shorten his stay.

I can not rule out the possibility that everyone rotting in debtor's prison in Dubai is guilty as sin, there might be a correlation between willingness to do business in autocraties and crookedness, after all. But I find a conviction in some Dubai court to be only very weak Bayesian evidence of guilt of anything, because I do not trust their justice system very much.

Your example of Dubai imprisoning rich foreigners for no reason is a bad example. Albert Douglas's son Wolfgang had a company that accumulated ~2.5 million pounds of debt in Dubai. So from Dubai's perspective, they were dealing with a clan of criminal fraudsters who stole from their country and then tried to run away.

I mean yeah but 'fairly useless lottery winners being able to arbitrarily suspend legal principles when it suits them' isn't a precedent that's super glowing if you're trying to flee there to avoid the Boogaloo.

If you're a powerful political elite while the world is in a crisis rich foreigners with minimal direct ties to your country are the best possible people to make examples out of. There's already an "us vs them" for the ordinary population especially if the country wasn't directly involved in causing the world crisis and them being foreigners means they likely don't have well developed connections with native elites meaning you don't end up pissing off a bunch of them (which could threaten your long term grip on power) when you make an example out of the rich foreigners.

Thiel and Co. need to realise that in the end they are made of the same flesh and blood as the meanest of us. If the world collapses everyone suffers, including them and their current fame means they don't get the cloak of invisibility conferred by (relative) anonymity even ordinarily successful UMC people do.