The amount of human effort, labor, and heartache put into squabbling over where someone was born or was naturalized is absolutely mind blowing.
Nations and kingdoms have been able to assert sovereignty for eons.
by asserting monopoly on violence within a geographical region... and now we got private mercenaries, guess Treaty of Westphalia is kinda out of windows now or soon?
Even if one government spanned literally every sentient being, it'd still need to ensure no citizen votes twice.
Who should be allowed to participate in the decision-making process that allocates these finite resources?
Vacuuming the (imaginary - we're using feelings here, let's not split hairs on things like 'markets') accounts of every billionaire and redistributing these funds evenly amounts to singular thousands of dollars to just citizens.
The overwhelming majority of actual taxpaying citizens don't pay enough tax to cover their per-capita share of government spending, is there some factual evidence to suggest that unlimited economic migrants would? (or could?)
We certainly can't give everyone a Bezos yacht. But we can probably have a little less famine, as a treat.
Surely it's cheaper to do that via foreign aid in whatever country that's experiencing famine, where the cost of living is lower?
Yes, and the United States cannot shoulder the burden of the entirety of the world's economic migrants.
Where is this magical, commensurate influx of licensed doctors coming from to deal with the influx of unlimited economic migrants (who can't cover their own tax expenses?)
We're not talking about yachts: we're talking about healthcare and food. Take all the yachts away, force Bezos to liquidate everything (and every other billionaire): neither the income nor the fixed assets are enough to cover healthcare for the population we already have, much less a gargantuan, unproductive group of new arrivals.
Exactly. Evidence actually points in the opposite direction:
https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-e...
https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250315_FNC...
> Evidence actually points in the opposite direction:
I was speaking about the United States: can you find a study that somehow documents illegal immigrant (by definition: undocumented) persons' productivity?
Folks brought over on legal immigration visas likely do make more money (and contribute more) than the average American: that's why we have these programs for 'exceptional' individuals. Nobody is going through the effort (nor can they afford the costs) of obtaining lawful visas for construction labor or meat processing staff.
1. If the entire federal government spend became supported solely by by Income Tax, that means all the other federal taxes would vanish. That other half [0] is way too large ignore when imagining what an alternate-universe American's wages and burden might look like.
2. Dividing by 340m means including the ~75m below age 18 [1] and I don't think we should expect day-old newborns to pay income taxes.
That said, this breakdown [2] may be useful for visualizing, particularly the two-stack diagram showing share-of-earnings versus share-of-taxes for different subgroups.
[0] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61185
[1] https://data.unicef.org/how-many/how-many-children-under-18-...
[2] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...
I agree with your overall point, seizing all the billionaires' wealth and redistributing it doesn't solve money woes (there are other reasons to do it), but they amount they do have is getting strikingly high.
In any case, money is accounting, not ability. The important question is: do we have the resources and skilled people needed for it? If not, then all the money in the world won't make it work. If so, then it can be done if people want it badly enough.
On the topic of the article, every hotel outside the US I've used has asked for my passport; I didn't know that a copy of the details exposed weaknesses on the electronic side.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Which is functionally the same as
> slavery or involuntary servitude, as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Considering the Date of Birth and Date of Expiry are necessarily limited in entropy, one should take care in protecting their Document Number as it is the greatest source of entropy for the derived "password key".
Every hotel in the US and any other country has asked for my passport (and credit card), but I'm not American.
The textual information on the page of my passport is basically public knowledge, like a phone number or an american social security number. It's rare that a hotel takes the passport out of sight (and potentially scan the chip), but a photocopy is fairly frequent.
As a US resident, I have often been asked for a drivers license in the US and it was actually an issue at one point when I had lost it though I was able to work around with some difficulty. I suspect the details were some combination of local/state/and hotel policy.
I have had issues with US hotels accept US passports and fought with one over it.
Generally speaking, hotels in the US do seem to want government ID. Don't really know the requirement in general. This was a fairly low-rent chain that I was only using because last minute. I expect if it had been one of my major loyalty chains, a manager would have fixed things pretty quickly.
ADDED: Normally I travel with a passport as well but, as I say, this was a last moment short trip so I didn't throw in all my travel pouches.
Many countries also have mandatory registration of foreign visitors that hotels do automatically so they know the drill.
If so, why? Aren't they all just people?
I'm certain that it varies even more between American states. Presumably the social "safety net" assistance in California is different to that in Montana. In Alaska people get free money.
Entitlement tends to be based on where you live
In reality though, 8 billion people hold a wide spectrum of beliefs. I would not want to live in a society with low taxation and low welfare for example. How can I live side-by-side with those that do? Of course, we all have limited choice to move if our society does not match our beliefs.
Which may seem like hypothetical questions to the young or the inexperienced, but are very real concerns hidden behind a veil of generally maintained civility in most of modern society.
This is a difficult concept for people to understand because they look at their paychecks and go "I'm not deriving so much wealth!" well yeah. A huge, large chunk of your wealth is being extracted for capitalism. And in manners that will be very difficult for you to understand.
I'll try to explain it, though, for the audience that peruses these forums. You're a software developer.
You work for a public B2B software company. Your wealth is being extracted to: Pay for those company pizza parties, pay for the office you work in, pay in to the healthcare system that "your company is paying for" that isn't directly part of the premium you see on open enrollment, paying for the company holiday parties, paying into everyone's various insurance plans to reduce the out-of-pocket costs for everyone in those insurance plans (outside of your company, of course), paying for the CEO's multi-million dollar paycheck, paying for the bonuses of all of the management, paying for shareholder value and dividends, paying for the taxes your company pays, paying for the taxes you pay.
If your existence at your job didn't pay for those things, most companies will tend to lay you off.
And this goes for pretty much the vast majority of workers in the vast majority of jobs.
So saying that more immigrants somehow puts a strain on the system is just by definition incorrect, even if a percentage of those immigrants don't generate the same level of value you do as an individual. Do you think every person in your organization generates the same relative value? Of course not. In most businesses in America, does the janitor generate the same wealth as the CEO?
To be fair, there is a snarky comment to be made there about CEOs--but the objective reality is probably not. But the janitor is still generating some wealth by ensuring a safe, healthy, and comfortable workplace for the employees. Does that mean the janitor is not entitled to income? to healthcare? to benefits? to company holiday parties? to company pizza parties?
Just convert this into a much larger scale of the entirety of a country's population--and well, the answer is that most populations have enough free money floating around somewhere to provide essential services to everyone: education, food, safety and security, health, and likely even housing, electricity, and pretty much any other public service we could provide.
And this scales as a population grows.
There are a lot of reasons for this, but the short answer is that health, education, and enough individual wealth to explore figuring out ways to generate new revenue streams is important. Authoritarian countries are by nature not able to do this due to limits of their authoritarian nature, not necessarily limits of their population numbers.
It's all intertwined :)