Imagine this blog is a business and you are a stock holder who got in early when I was starting up. The blog is booming and that means the value of the stock is booming. I figure I can capitalize on the boom and start issuing more stock. That’s good for me, but there’s one problem. That dilutes the value of your stock. That would be a crappy thing for me to do to my stock holders, which is why companies tend to avoid doing this.
But, let’s assume I don’t care about my stock holders and I start issuing new stock. One thing that will happen is current stock holders will begin dumping the stock. After all, the value of the stock will most likely decline and the point of buying the stock in the first place is to get something for it, as in a return on the investment. If I keep issuing stock, the price will collapse and the stock will be worthless.
The same logic applies to citizenship. Being a Canadian has value. You get cheap maple syrup, high alcohol beer and good hockey. There’s also the protection of the Canadian government, law enforcement, economic benefits and social welfare benefits. In return, the citizen serves on juries, pays taxes and serves in the military when required. A country is a lot like a company and the citizens are stock holders. It’s not a perfect analogy, but a useful one.
What our rulers seek to do is dilute the value of citizenship by offering it to whoever staggers along.
Rep Luis V. Gutiérrez, one of Congress’ most outspoken advocates for immigrants, on Wednesday called for expanding the Affordable Care Act to cover all of the estimated 11 million undocumented migrants in the United States.
“The goal is to make integration and inclusion real for millions of families that are locked out under current law,” the Illinois Democrat said in a floor speech introducing his proposed legislation.
“As it stands right now, undocumented immigrants are not subject to the individual mandate and cannot buy into health insurance exchanges even if they use their own money. My legislation will change that. It says that we stand for inclusion.”
Citing last week’s papal address to Congress (the pope repeatedly urged U.S. lawmakers to follow “the Golden Rule”), Gutiérrez said: “Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you means moving forward with no restrictions on which brother and sister and neighbor we think of as ‘eligible’ or ‘deserving.’”
The Gutiérrez legislation faces long odds in the House, where proposals to overhaul immigration have been stymied by Republicans who insist the federal government must first address holes in border security.
If everyone on earth is eligible for the benefits of citizenship, as long as they get to America, what point is there in being a citizen? More important, why would anyone try to make the country better? The whole point of investing in a company or a country is to make it better. In the case of a country, better for your descendants. If the children of foreigners are going to take from your kids the fruit of your labor, why bother?
That would obviously spill into voting, as doing what’s best for the country would lose all value. Instead, factions would vote in blocks, at war with other factions, for the right to take what they can from whomever they can. That’s assuming people both voting. The only solution to that is authoritarianism where the national government uses force to compel cooperation from and among the people.
That’s what our betters have failed to understand. At some point, people will simply not respond to patriotic appeals or moral suasion. After all, loyalty to the state will have no basis as there is no benefit to citizenship. The relationship becomes purely transactional as both sides try to beat the other in their dealings. The only result of open borders is a Hobbesian world that looks more like the Middle East than Western Civilization.
It is my impression that the both price and demand for green card marriage transactions have taken a dive since the nineties.
I think that the “stock market” analogy of citizenship is a little strained. Suppose you own shares of a business. If the company sells additional shares *at the market price* you should probably be indifferent to the capital raise. If the company has $100 of assets and 100 shares outstanding, the per-share value of the company is $1. If they sell 100 new shares to investors at $1 per share, the assets and share count both increase, such that the per-share value remains the same. Now, what I think you’re getting at is the problem if a secondary offering at… Read more »
One small critique, “…are the folks buying in the secondary offering at a discounted price. They get the benefits of ownership without somehow paying a fair price.” , make that they are not paying any price.
My sense is that the relationship between the powers that be, and the rest of us, has been purely transactional for a long time now, from their side of things. What I cannot fathom is how TPTB can believe that the end game in all of this accrues any benefits to them, whatsoever. They are more afraid of little old us, than they are of the hordes of migrants? Of course, TPTB seemed to prosper and thrive through WW1, WW2, and the cold war, so maybe they are ready to roll the dice again.
If you wish to see the results of cobbling together different ethnic groups just look at what happened to Yugoslavia. Or Czechoslovakia Or the USSR Or MOST of the nations put together , post 1918, by the Brits & French in the Middle East. Or many of the nations put together in Africa in the 20th century, by the Brits and French. Note that almost ALL those nations created by the Briits & French were left by them with parliamentary representatitive governments , but this did not endure. Also note that post USSR, almost none of the regions that comprised… Read more »
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” So said L P Hartley, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the government is becoming a foreign country, in more ways than one. As the government keeps doing things differently to what its citizens would ask (and heaven knows, most of us don’t ask much by and large, with our interest focused on efficient refuse/garbage disposal, well-maintained and lit roads, and a guarantee of personal and regional security including border controls) we must conclude that — whichever side of the Atlantic they reside on — our respective government’s… Read more »
If I had my way, this blog would be required reading at every American college and university. Of course, the future leaders of the free world would first have to look up the definition of citizenship, as that concept is conveniently not taught in middle or high school anymore. But hey, they know everything there is to know about recycling and the wonders of a carbon tax!
We can actually have a distinct country, unified by culture, values, language, a sense of belonging/citizenship without having “loyalty to the state”. The State can and does change. The State often engages in things in which the citizenry would rather not have a part. The State can and does exist outside/alongside of the concept of country. I want to be a citizen of my country, not a client of the State. I don’t want my country handing out “citizenship” to all comers, but unfortunately the State feels differently. And the open borders thing is simply a UN-led effort to erase… Read more »