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Notes -
Why is Peter Thiel Moving to Argentina?
Some Irresponsible Speculation
Billionaire Investor and ideologue Peter Thiel has publicly announced that he is moving to Argentina. Among a grab bag of explanations that included nuclear war and AI risk, along with the obvious implications of the California wealth tax on his residency, Thiel reportedly was concerned about the political direction of the United States. Given Thiel's ties to much of the American political right, what does this tell us? What should our Bayesian update be from this information?
Some possibilities:
-- Get the obvious out of the way: Nothing ever happens. This is a non-event, Thiel is moving for publicity or tax reasons, and the announcements are just him engaging in punditry.
-- Alternatively, none of this may indicate anything because Thiel himself might be stupid/mistaken/prejudiced/insane.
-- Thiel is in deep with MAGA, but thinks that the wind is changing direction, the MAGA project has failed, and he doesn't want to be left holding the bag in America when the left comes back into power. This seems like a sub implication of the action even if he doesn't believe it, because his very act of fleeing and blaming the political climate will tend to reinforce the idea that MAGA has failed and increase the odds of it failing.
-- Alternatively, Thiel thinks MAGA will be triumphant, but Thiel is on the outs with The Donald, and he is concerned about being targeted after Trump turns on him. Moving to Argentina is an attempt to hedge risk.
-- Thiel is a true believer in the Argentine project, and thinks Millei-ism will succeed beyond all our wildest dreams.
It feels like something big for Thiel, who is intelligent and well informed if perhaps nuts, to make this move and publicly announce it is motivated by the state of the union.
Other option: the geo-physical event is coming in the near to medium term and he’s moving to safer territory. At least that’s where my mind went. South America is speculated to ride things out better than North America.
Edit: on a more serious note (not implying the GE is not serious, just less serious), maybe he just realized NZ is a terrible hedge. It seems to me that the commonwealth countries are far more pozzed than the US. It seems hard for me to imagine the government there will be friendly, despite what money can can throw around. 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.
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.
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