Subject: Investing with an eye on rising authoritarianism
I’m a US citizen, and I’ve enjoyed a relatively stable investing situation for my entire life, and I’ve benefited massively from that situation over the past few decades.

However, I’m starting to feel like the boiled frog the last few years watching our institutions struggle to hold against the rise of more of an authoritarian type rule, where the judiciary is being corrupted and the rule of law doesn’t apply to everyone fairly equally. Historically, from what I read, businesses don’t generally thrive under authoritarian rule like they do in a functioning democracy. For instance, government leaders can attack businesses for their own personal gain, using the co-opted judiciary and police to extract bribes and concessions.

I’m not trying to be political here, and don’t want to get into an argument on wether it’s coming or not, but would rather stipulate for discussion purposes that it IS coming so I can try to think through the possible scenarios. As an investor I’m constantly projecting out 20-30 years in the future when trying to plan for things, but I think it’s pretty nieve of me to think things will be as stable as they have been the past few decades here in the US.

Have any here tried to game out how to deal with such a scenario where the US is no longer looked to as the “leader of the free world” but instead starts to side with (and becomes) authoritarians? Have any here lived under an authoritarian regime? Are there steps investors could take to insulate themselves somehow? If the US slides into authoritarianism, I’m wondering how long it would take the rest of the “free” countries to hold the line. Can the EU hold the line? Canada? Where would one invest?

More specifically, how would Berkshire fare under such authoritarian rule?

Again, please treat this as a thought experiment and not an attack on your specific political views.

https://freedomhouse.org/repor...