Lore, I think there are 2 kinds of "big money":
* the connected rich. The majority of the dynasties that date from the Great Depression to the present.
* the unconnected rich. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Slim Pickens, Steve Jobs, etc. Upstarts dating from commodity boom of the 1970s, and the software industry of the 1980s.
The unconnected rich want to be the connected rich. I have a feeling that this explains some of Gates, Buffet's, and Picken's reprehensible behaviors and attitudes as of late. The whole situation reminds me of something straight out of "Atlas Shrugged", where a high fraction of the offspring of industrialists and capitalists (eg, James Taggart) joined the socialistic syndicate that was forming around shady deals in smoky back-rooms.
The connected rich are already essentially a mafia, and becoming ever more so.
The only rich who would have a strong incentive to run for it are the unconnected rich. Jim Rogers has already seen the writing on the wall and offshored himself. The rest of them think they've got a place at the table.
I think as far as North America is concerned, we need to think in terms of Mafias and Nomenklaturas. Consider the late-stage Soviet Union, that had secret crime-syndicate billionaires most people in the western countries had no idea existed, or on a smaller scale, Cuba with its millions living in squalor, and a crime syndicate ruling class living in luxury.
The Mafias and Nomenklaturas will have no need to run for it, because they will be protected from the high taxes and increasingly draconian laws and regulations. What they might possibly do if things get too bad, is what the Cuban mafia does: sends their princesses overseas to enjoy a more pleasant life, while Mom and Dad stay behind in the hellhole they created, to continue making money.
One thing to consider, too, is that while the middle class will be annihilated, the ranks of the rich will be thinned as well, necessarily, as the pie shrinks. For a while I have been posting about celebrities who are now financially ruined, such as Annie Liebowitz (sp?) (her art is now largely in hock as collateral against loans to try to salvage her leveraged participation in the real estate bubble: and the worst possible investments, too: luxury use assets, that produce NO income). My point was and remains that a lot of rich will fall from the heights.
I suggest that unless you, personally, have a significant personal fortune to work with, that you will probably need to retrench and reorganize before pursuing those "attractive opportunities". I suspect, too, that travel and relocation will become greater challenges in the future, than they have been for the past few decades.
I suggest too that you might want to recruit partners to organize with. For example, it is hard for the little guys to establish offshore investments, but it becomes easier when there is enough pooled wealth to exceed the necessary thresholds.
