Requesting advice- where to live

There are probably much more important concerns when choosing a country than the ones you have listed. You haven't even discussed immigration policies. Some of the concerns you have listed (such as intervening in a crisis, burglars) are unlikely to even effect you and seem entirely ideological.

I suggest you rethink this and come up with a list of requirements based on practical concerns rather than ideology.

You're looking at the wrong things. The first thing you need to choose is density - city, town/suburb, or rural. I recommend city. Then decide on a particular city (not caring what country it's in), based on things that actually affect your lifestyle - mainly the culture, the community of specific people who live in it, and the probability-distribution of things you'll encounter walking around its streets. Laws and economics are relatively unimportant, except insofar as you have to get a job in a city that pays enough for the local living expenses before you can move there.

Move to the San Francisco Bay Area, spend a year boosting your rationality through daily interaction with dozens of long-time rationalists, and then figure out where it'll be best for you to live.

"My city has nice weather all year, a growing economy, public transportation, low taxes, tons of culture and attractive people, you should move here."

"Okay... but can I kill burglars?"

You don't even mention climate or taxes. These affect your life every day.

Regardless of your other preferences, if you are a city slicker, picking one of the top 10 most livable cities is probably not a bad idea. As for the countries, the same list suggests Germany/Canada/Switzerland/Australia. Not coincidentally, all these have strong economies and relatively stable governments and have been this way for quite some time. I can see no indication that the situation is going to change for the worse in the next two decades in any of those places, but this is always a gamble.

Unfortunately, being an attorney will alrgely restrict you to whatever country you were born a citizen of. My impression is that unless you want to work for a multinational (which is, by private contract a means of lmiting "going about your business") you will have to make do with your home country.

My suggestion for maximizing your freedom, that is what you're driving for it seems, is to pick a profession that allows as much remote work as possible and without the need for visas. This maximizes your ability to choose locations at each time, moving if they fail to satisfy your criteria or if the trade-off is no longer worth it.

Israel has no internet censorship (though such legislation is often proposed), allows you to kill burglars (the "Shai Dromi bill"), and has a relatively okay economy. I don't know about your other requirements.

Have you considered renting as opposed to buying somewhere for two decades?

As an example, say you pick Texas, and you buy a home in Dallas Texas, planning to stay there for 20 years. Then, you receive an opportunity to go take a job in Houston Texas at substantially more pay 3 years into your mortgage, but you'd have to move.

This can happen to any place we pick, to any of your five criteria, over 20 years. Recessions can occur, Laws can change, etcetera.

Renting as opposed to owning allows you flexibility to switch much easier. If Texas encounters a recession, you may be able to move to Maryland to take advantage of a biotech boom. If Maryland passes too many restrictive laws, you can move to Florida. If Florida then weakens property rights, you can move to Britain. The specific locations don't matter as much for these examples. The important thing is that you are not as tied down, and so can fine tune your location to your five criteria.

This is not to say that renting is certainly the best for all circumstances. If it turns out Texas worked for 20 years, and you rented for those 20 years, it probably would have been better to buy.

Bear in mind that there are both Pro and Anti Rent oriented sites on the web, which will tell you things like "Never rent ever, you are throwing money away." and "Never buy ever, it is a financial death sentence if anything goes wrong." A full discussion of this would probably be outside of the scope of your question. But there are a lot of rent vs mortgage calculators available to run the numbers for you, such as here: http://realestate.yahoo.com/calculators/rent_vs_own.html

Nothing to do with rationality. Downvoted.

I suggest rethinking your requirements. Many seem to be missing and the current one's look like solutions rather than what you actually want.

Here is some help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requirement#Characteristics_of_good_requirements http://www.processimpact.com/articles/qualreqs.html

Unlike you, IANAL, but killing burgulars would be legal in most places if you can convince the courts that someone's life/health was in serious danger at the time, and that violence was the only reasonable option, wouldn't it? I mean, as long as you can argue that the violence was not excessive relative to what it would take to passivate the dangerous burgular, and that death was an accidental side effect and not intended?

That is, for some local interpretations of "serious", "reasonable" and "excessive", surely. Is it your impression that these things are interpreted too much in favor of the burgular in some places, or do you object to the principle that danger-to-life should determine whether killing trespassers should be legal or not?

I am new here on Less Wrong, and I hope I don't invite too much mind-killing here… But still, I'm a bit curious about this.