How Peter Thiel Got New Zealand Citizenship | Hacker News Reader

How Peter Thiel Got New Zealand Citizenship

nzherald.co.nz

23 pointspolemic18 comments

In a perfect world, everyone would be a citizen of everywhere. In this world, people are deprived of citizenship to protect the interests of current citizens. A question would be, which is more likely, that a billionaire investor adds or subtracts from your society.

There seems to be more economic residencies and citizenships available now than ever, I assume those nations with said programs have decided wealthy people are net positive.

Or the people who make the laws and/or decisions have decided it's a net positive for them anyway.

As a New Zealander, I think it's absolutely fantastic that Peter Thiel is a fellow citizen. I welcome him, as well as other law-abiding wealth creators with open arms, and hope that Government policy of providing such persons with easy paths to citizenship continues.

Capitalists are wealth sinks, not wealth sources.

capitalism requires trading for mutual benefit, which promotes creation of products for sale and competition on prices. How is that a wealth sink? For an individual to make a billion dollars they have to create a company that sells multiple billions of dollars of products to mutual benefit of customers...

Sure, sure, that's the great thinking of the day: billionaires can do anything they want, enter your country, become citizens, even pay reduced taxes, while rich countries (read US and UK for the time being) are closing the borders to people in real need.

So that either those people will not get at all help, or a reduced amount of countries (and maybe even poor countries) will be forced to bear the burden of helping them.

You get richer by getting trickle down economics of wealthy individuals[1], and the rest get poorer.

[1] The more plausible outcome is that, as one sibling comment mentions, you will not get that much from those wealthy individuals. They will come with their millions, squander your resources, workforce and capital, and move to the next bidder in a couple of years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_refugee_p...

NZ is small I know, but it's not like they're some refugee haven standing bright.

The primary role of the government is to serve its own people. No country has an obligation to spend money on foreign aid, accept refugees etc involuntarily.

Everything costs money and you'd guess most taxpayers aren't enthused of e.g. supporting foreigners en masse, having plenty of domestic problems of their own.

First, you are factually wrong: most countries are signatires of international refugee programs.

Second, in your wicked world, who helps the refugees? Who helps you when you become a refugee?

Bear in mind that most refugees are displaced because of geopolitical developments, of which rich countriss, specially US and UK, are in big part responsible.

Yes, they can enter your country, donate a million dollars to a city crippled by earthquakes, invest in your most dynamic startup to fund their US expansion, and bring a massive network of contacts to a country with little access to venture capital.

Peter Thiel would be an asset to any country, but to New Zealand in particular, he is immensely valuable.

Peter Thiel is valuable because he has the money, but the people who created that money for him are not inherently valuable. They are interchangeable so they have no real value.

The opening five words of the story "Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel" pretty much answers the titular question for me.

We live in a deeply flawed world.

Billionaires are people too. It shouldn't be any surprise that countries let in people who are an asset financially faster than they would let in people who are a burden.

By most accounts, on average, immigration is never a burden. At worst, it's a short term burden and a long term benefit.

Didn't even bother to fly to New Zealand to get his citizenship.

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