I think your too focused on tradeable citizenship as answer to problems. Even if its a good idea (and I don't see why it would be), I doubt it would answer all sorts of different things. Governments would be pretty much the way they are now, you would still have special interests and malign and/or ignorant political actors.
Voting would be by way of citizens only doing the voting. They would have an incentive to increase the value of their citizenship rather than the current incentive to grab their piece of the action while the getting is good.
If getting your special interest handout decreases the value of your citizenship, but less than the benefit you gain from the handout, then you'd still want the handout. Also a lot of people would not recognize the decrease in value (or if they see it happen, the reason for it), special interests are surprisingly often honest, or if they are lying they are lying to themselves first. People really come to believe the thing that is good for them, or people like them, or people they like, is generally good.
Having a specific citizenship (or legal residence, would that be traded too?) opens up opportunities, but most things of value don't directly come from citizenship. Someone with a business that can't easily be moved would value his citizenship highly, but he's not really valuing the citizenship, he's valuing the ability to continue to benefit from the good setup he has made for himself.
A citizenship market would tend to be illiquid. Most would not want to sell their citizenship. You could open new slots and sell them. That brings in more revenue for the government (a fact that is positive in some ways and negative in others). It would (assuming they are not spending much of their wealth just to get the citizenship and move in) tend to cause new citizens to have enough money to support themselves, but just because they have money, wouldn't not stop them from rent-seeking and act as a special interest as much as anyone else. And it would do nothing about illegal immigration.
The idea of having swarms of Mexicans invading and literally taking possession of the USA would be seen for what it really is - conquest.
That is at the very least overstating the issue. Also tradable citizenship does nothing about it. Many of those Mexicans moving in are illegals.
Because it is not acknowledged that each winning invader grabs $2 million worth of assets
Many of them are net producers of assets, net economic benefits to the country. If your concern is people coming here for welfare, your could change welfare eligibility. If that's not what your talking about then what assets are being taken. People might get a huge economic benefit from being here, but unless they are stealing, or defrauding, or having the government take money for them, that benefit is not grabbing things from others. Opportunity is a positive sum game. |
