<Why? Not giving newly born Americans citizenship isn't a protection of property rights.>
If everything is already owned by somebody or some group of somebodies, then giving it away in whole or part to somebody else is of course a dilution of the property right.
Say the country comprised a 4 bedroom house, and there are 8 people living there, 2 to a room, then adding another 8 people, or even just another 1, is going to create significant dilution of the existing property right.
When I drive along roads, they used to be uncongested compared with these days, with the roads blocked by hordes of immigrants. They have been given, without payment, possession of the roads my ancestors built. I was given it without payment too, but that was considered tribal inheritance.
My point is that tribal inheritance is fine for chimpanzees and the warring human past with alpha male dominance hierarchy territorial kleptocratic racialism. Collectivist communist ideology evolved from that - all for one and one for all, let's all share everything in common ownership, to each according to their needs and from each according to their abilities.
I say a better way to run a railroad is tradable citizenship with property assigned to individuals, not tribal chiefs in collectivist communism, even if the rulers are appointed by mob vote every few years rather than a self-appointed politburo.
<If people have four children, they cannot each inherit the same value as their parents had.
Again why? >
Simply arithmetic. $800 divided by 2 = $400 each. Divided by 4 = $200 each. Yes, the total is the same, except that it's not - the dilution of ownership reduces the value of open spaces and other assets by a cluttering factor. When something is so overcrowded that it's unusable for all, then the value goes down a lot. Personal space has value. When that is destroyed the total value goes down.
Value goes up as population increases for many things = for example a road might be uneconomic for a mountain pass with only 40 people living on each side of the mountain, but a 6 lane tunnel with trains too might be worthwhile with a million living on each side, such as in Switzerland.
So selling citizenship does dilute ownership, but because places like New Zealand could use greater economies of scale in many places, though poor road management means congestion is costly in Auckland, having swarms more people who buy their citizenships would add great value to both them and the host country.
True, but children are not mindless clones like worker bees in a happy commune beehive. They are people: <In many ways, in many places, producing more children is a plus for society not a minus. > That's why we have 4 little darlings. But that means they block the roads for others and people without children paid for our children's education. It was great for us but not so great for competing people. Society in humans is not like a hive of bees which are all one happy family.
There are winners and losers in human hives. By more accurately assigning property rights, societies are vastly improved. The better the allocation, definition and protection of property rights, the better the country.
<Who would they pay it to? If its the government, you've basically created a new tax that falls on the younger children of medium to large families.>
No, the decease person could gift their citizenship to one person, say the youngest child, or they could have it sold and the value split among the descendants so that all share equally.
If people want to buy a citizenship, they would buy it from either the government issuing new citizenships, or from somebody who is selling an existing one, such as a deceased estate or somebody leaving the country who no longer wants their citizenship.
<If its doles out to the current citizens, like the first two children or a married couple or (considering out of wedlock children and divorce and remarriage) perhaps I should say rather the first (or perhaps one child picked by) each person with children (or perhaps each person, could childless people give a right to citizenship to someone else's child? ).>
The idea is to allocate citizenships to the existing citizens when the Citizenship Act is passed. So, anyone who is already a citizen would get one and probably babies conceived before the date too. And perhaps any babies born to people who are already legally married [not the common-law shacked-up variety of "marriage" that we now have] - to avoid argument over the actual date of conception. There would presumably be quite a spate of marriages as people beat the closing date. Hmmmmm.... problems problems.... there would be pressure on to lower the age of marriage to 12 or 10 so that any offspring from some later real marriage would not miss out.
There would obviously be quite some dispute about entitlements since the value of a NZ citizenship would be, I guess, initially, something like NZ$1 million. But really, I think they would be worth $2 million in 5 years and $4 million in 10 years when people realize just how much better things can be when run properly rather than in the current wastrel ways.
<So effectively you've created a privileged class that can live off of other people. >
We already have that. I am part of that privileged class which is an earned privilege. I studied, worked, saved, invested and now enjoy the rewards. The USA lives at low cost on the intense productive labour of poorly paid Chinese.
New Zealand also allows in swarms of people who have to work to get more money than the welfare state will give them [which is heaps to hordes of them]. Those people work to provide me with the things I want. By letting lots of them in, I get lots of people working for low pay so my money goes further than if the government didn't let them in and I had to pay lots more to a lazy local.
Because I don't go to work by way of commuting, I don't get caught up in the traffic jams - normally, though occasionally I venture into the mess to see what it's like or because I forget just how bad it is.
Yes, the citizens of a country have privileges that others do not have. The privileges are just more tightly defined and the value correctly assigned.
If I go to the USA, I don't arrive and be granted the same rights as American citizens. I'm defined as an alien and have all sorts of restrictions and limitations placed on me. Of course Americans and people in other countries don't just allow anyone from anywhere to help themselves to everything.
Guest workers are allowed in many countries. I was a guest worker in foreign countries for years and it was very profitable. I was a worker for the "privileged" class in NZ too for years, working day and night to earn money from the landed gentry, industrial owners, government departments and anyone else who would pay me well enough.
The farmer would sit around while I loaded his hay from 7am to 10pm for 1c per bale. I wheeled concrete in non-stop 12 hour shifts from 6pm to 6am building a valve tower for a dam. I mean non-stop - no meal breaks or anything. Want to pee? Fire it over the side. Sandwiches sitting on the reinforcing steel and getting a bite on the way around. I have a long list of such jobs I have done. Truck driving, spray painting, machine shops, mentally and physically disabled supervision and transport. I was far from the privileged class.
People become the privileged class by working for it. But in the communist places, one becomes the privileged class by knowing the right people or being born in the right family. In the democratic realm, dividing up the spoils of power is the norm and that's the road to the privileged class in those systems. Now, in democracies, the privileged class has become so top heavy that whole countries are capsizing. Looting opm is the name of the game.
In Tradable Citizenship societies, privilege is earned and looting is punished. There is no corrupt official to bribe to be pushed to the top of the list for a free-loader citizenship certificate. People have to buy them at the going rate.
<Not giving new American's citizenship isn't protecting property rights, its creating privileged and less privileged classes, and taking a lot of property from those in the later if they want to move up to the former. >
Yes, people love a good class war. Communists and Big Government people who like to be part of the privileged cast object to freedom, self-determination, private property, capitalist, private enterprise, creating value, imagination and creativity.
They like to have serfs to rule and armies to obey. They like to be dominant and order other people around and take opm by force and kleptocracy for their own purposes.
People will, as always, be in the communist or individual freedom camps. You obviously prefer the communist, collectivist ways with property vested in the state, not the individual.
Most people seem to be like that, which is not surprising given our chimpoid antecedents with tribal lives being our common history around the world.
Mqurice |
