It's not so much Tradable Citizenship as private property in general rather than public serfdom with the collectivist tribal bosses owning everything which is the issue. It's commonly accepted these days that private property is not necessarily a bad thing and many people think it's a good thing.
In strongly communist/hippie/tribal communities, total public ownership is still considered the ideal. But looking around the world at different communities, to the extent that individuals do the owning, people are better off. Tradable citizenship is just another step in that process which is already well established with individuals in many countries even being allowed to own land, if only in fee simple and still subordinate to "eminent domain".
Yes, there would still be some similarities and people would still pursue individual benefits at public cost, but the process would be more visible because there would be an actual measurement running constantly.
<most things of value don't directly come from citizenship. > That depends on which country. The most primal places don't have much public value, but places which have been civil for a century or two have accumulated a great deal of public value per capita. Not just in material assets such as roads,
buildings, airports, sewerage, water and electricity supplies, telcommunications and the whole panopoly of modernity, but also in more abstract value such as stable legal and political systems, clean air, clean water, low murder and violence rates, cultural norms and trust.
If such a place was opened to another umpty million or billion people, the dilution would be enormous and the value destroyed in not just years, but months.
In countries such as New Zealand, Oz and other valuable countries, most value is publicly owned. Private assets such as houses, commercial buildings, companies and whatnot are less valuable per capita, I guess. A NZ citizenship would be worth about US$1 million and maybe $2 million if publicly traded [as things are right now, and would rapidly increase.] That's substantially more than the private assets of the average Kiwi so I'd say the public value is about double the private value [near enough for government work].
<A citizenship market would tend to be illiquid. Most would not want to sell their citizenship. > They would be highly liquid. Tens of thousands of people move around, permanently to other countries. If people don't wish to sell a citizenship and move, then that's fine too, but with 25% of Kiwis living overseas, that's a LOT of people who might be tempted to nab their share and make their move permanent. Or, they might buy one back if they see the decline stopping in a few years.
< it would do nothing about illegal immigration > Most people don't realize just how much it's costing them to have swarming illegal immigrants. If the value being transferred was recognized, the borders would be locked up tighter than the Great Wall of China.
<Many of them are net producers of assets, net economic benefits to the country. > Yes, and some are fantastically superlative. But being a net producer of assets isn't quite enough unless you include dilution of the public value such as uncongested roads, water supplies, fisheries, unpolluted air and spectrum. How many immigrants would you want living in your house, even if they do net economic benefit such as mowing the lawn in exchange for free rent, free water, free tv watching, free couch sitting....? The measurement of "net economic benefit" looks very narrow to me.
Some of the Mexican flag waving looks similar to a victory parade. When the Europeans took over the Americas, New Zealand, Oz, the locals probably weren't thinking in Tradable Citizenship terms either but could see that their ownership was being badly diluted: <That is at the very least overstating the issue. > In New Zealand, the Europeans are the new Maoris, being superseded by China's thousand million who could do with some more room to spread out. Just as the British did not adopt Maori cultural norms, China's migrants won't adopt New Zealand cultural norms. It's an age old process of one tribe taking over from and subsuming another less effective one. If they can do it without paying for it, they tend to do that. If the locals are happy to simply hand it over, then it's fair enough to accept. We did it in Canada - one of our off-spring owns a Canadian citizenship.
Plenty of the acquisition is by outright fraud, <unless they are stealing, or defrauding, or having the government take money for them, that benefit is not grabbing things from others > with some perpetrators now in gaol but mostly they get away with it. Taito Philip Field is an example of a politician gaoled for such fraud. Grabbing is a reasonable description of the process.
Mqurice |
