Decades ago, I made the horrible mistake of thinking that welfare would best be done by governments because then it would be fair, without me having to guess who really needed help and who didn't. The "human face" is only a mask: < Now, it is the turn of the soft, Western style socialism, the one with a human face. > In fact, what resulted, was the hideous welfare states of free-loading and unwanted, unloved children as meal tickets enabling a bigger piece of the tax payer pie for the owners of the children. It is a horrible form of slavery. In New Zealand, welfare children are regularly tortured to death and many are simply tortured and terrorized. Apart from that hideous state-sponsored torture and terror, pain and suffering, hordes of people are taught to be dependent and helpless as their easiest way to get cash.
At least I realized my horrible blunder early in adulthood, but most people still believe in minimum pay rates, affirmative action, all sorts of labour laws and other imposts on the productive by the unproductive bludgers. Not only is there directly inflicted pain and suffering, there is the general debilitation of society which means indirect and less obvious pain and suffering due to misdirected spending.
Two of my grandparents experienced grave poverty as children, so it's not as though I'm talking from silver spoon in mouth trustafarian territory. My parents became adults in the midst of the Great Depression and my father spent 4 years in the middle east defeating Germany. The 1950s and 1960s were pretty good by comparison, but of course nothing like the easy luxury of nowadays, which young people seem not to recognize as luxury.
Regarding $1 million for a Greek [or NZ] citizenship, that is only a starting price. Very few people have thought at all what their countries are worth now and could be worth if done right. Remember, that's not just buying a passport. I mean actual tradable ownership, so people could sell it again like they can sell shares in a company. If the company or country does well during their ownership, they can not only sell it for a profit, but can be paid dividends from profits. $1 million is rather cheap and implies GDP and public assets of quite low ranking.
When you think of Greece, suppose they sell 50,000 per year at $1 million, it would take 100 years to increase the population by 5 million, which would hardly crowd the place. It would likely not even make up for natural population loss through death rates. 50,000 per year = $50 billion. With the Greek population of 11 million [and falling] that would be an income per Greek of $5000 per year which could be paid either as a cash dividend or invested in highways, airports, wharves, optical fibre, satellites, water supplies, power stations or whatever the population votes for. It's unlikely they would vote to pay for government workers and bludgers to loaf around wasting the income.
Apart from that $5000 per year, new citizens would invest in housing and other things they want to buy, as well as start spending money on car repairs, road tolls, supermarkets, restaurants, hospitals, air travel, sea cruises, moorings, souvlake, ouzo, and all the rest. Tourism would boom as visitors go to see the most amazing innovation since Greek democracy thousands of years ago. Work permits would be issued by the umpty thousands. The EC could be dumped along with the euro. The drachma would soar. The Swiss would get envious and copy the Tradable Citizenship idea to avoid swarms of Swiss moving south. Sweden would lose swarms as reglaciation in 2020 buries the country [contrary to Global Warming theory, serious cold is coming in 2020, maybe to the extent of reglaciation].
Greek Citizenship should be heading for $5 million soon enough. Some Greeks will sell their citizenship and move to Morocco, Sri Lanka, NZ, or somewhere, buying a really cheap citizenship, and hiring half a dozen servants. Some people will own half a dozen, simply for the profits. They will not be voting for self-dealing kleptocrats to run the country.
Mqurice |
