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Politics : Foreign Policy Discussion Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (9668)	4/18/2010 7:58:49 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15994

The point is property rights. That's the thing to keep in sight. If people could just cash in by printing themselves money by breeding like bunnies, it would be no different than counterfeiting, which is considered a federal crime. The point is that the value of countries has been produced by the natural value of the place and the efforts of those who are there and have gone before. When people have two children, those two inherit the value produced by their two parents. If people have four children, they cannot each inherit the same value as their parents had. Think of a country like a house. Two children can grow up, marry the two children from the house next door, and each couple still has a house. If there are more than four, then somebody misses out, or the property value is diluted by dividing it up among the lot. A country would be better run because the incentives would be right to protect values of property and to increase them, and to not simply go on producing hordes of children. Fortunately, the incentives to produce hordes of children have declined around the world and the ability to avoid having hordes has increased [thanks to contraception]. Back to sharing out citizenships among descendants, the obvious answer to [for example] us having four children [which we did] would be to pass on the value of the citizenships equally to each by selling them and handing over the cash [in our wills]. Said offspring could then decide to buy their own citizenships by taking out a mortgage and working hard to pay it off. Or they might think "I'm off! I'll buy a nice cheap Indian citizenship and live in a warmer place where there are some great business opportunities and cheap servants". Or they might spend the money and live hand to mouth working, earning and paying taxes to the citizens. The point is assigning individual ownership to property instead of the communist, hippie commune idea that we all own the property together for the good of all, but especially those who get their grubby paws in the till and control of things such as immigration for their friends and family and those who bribe them. Hippie communes on a small scale, and communism or tribal collective life on a grand scale, sound good when discussed theoretically, or invented by Karl Marx in a nice quiet library, or when viewed from afar, but living it on a daily basis shows the ugly side of human nature and the results of individuality. One person sits around stoned while the other works - pretty soon the workers get sick of the stoners bludging. Sure, if we were all clones, like ants, or worker bees, we could live happy collectivist lives, but that's not what humans are. We are individuals, working for our own and our family's benefit, hopefully co-operatively with the hordes of humanity surrounding us. Assigning property rights to individuals has been proven everywhere to be the best way of getting incentives right, not to mention it is the ethical and moral way to live. Mqurice