I’ll never forget the first time I saw a lobster boiled alive. It was at a family gathering when I was very young, perhaps five or six years old. One of my aunts calmly picked up a happily wriggling lobster out of an ice chest and dropped it in a pot of boiling water.

It’s no secret that governments worldwide are broke. One country after another is cutting social benefits and taking other measures to reduce government spending.

Freedom to travel is a fundamental and internationally recognized human right. Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states:

One of the assumptions of the eurozone – those 19 countries in Europe that use the euro as their national currencies – is that if any country left the zone, economic disaster would follow in its wake.

FATCA, otherwise known as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, is one of the most arrogant and one-sided laws ever passed by Congress. I first wrote about it in this essay.

Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, just became the unlikely spokesperson for the 8 million or so US citizens living abroad. Boris is an “accidental” US citizen. Although his parents were British, he was born in the US.

Expats and foreign investors are among the easiest marks for fraud – one of the dangers of international investing that promoters don’t like to talk about. Fraudulent real estate deals are rife.

My recent essay debunking a Puerto Rican tax incentive sparked a heated reaction from one of its most ardent backers. You can read it here.

FATCA and similar laws have eviscerated financial privacy in the US. And last year, thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden, the world learned the extent of the surveillance conducted by America’s largest spy agency, the NSA.