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Comment by kingmanaz | Hacker News Reader

A guaranteed minimum income may heighten the importance of citizenship. Rather than a state being little more than a place to make money for any and all that arrive within a state's borders - in other words, a global free market - the state's prosperity would be tied to an individual's well being through ties of relation. Proof of citizenship would be of paramount in a guaranteed minimum income scheme, and yet the concept of citizenship seems to have been discarded for the notion of global citizenship in recent decades. It will be interesting to see how a guaranteed basic income survives in the age of border-less states.

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why should citizenship be important? Isn't this effectively nationalism, which is what drove WWI?

Over six billion people inhabit earth, the majority of which do not live in a state with a guaranteed minimum income. An open border policy coupled with free money will likely lead to increased economic migration.

A life boat is only so big.

Simply more proof that "global citizenship" is a elitist idea incompatible with the basic welfare of people.

I am an emigrant to the United States. I had to flee the place I'm from for political reasons (the place was unsafe for me and my family). But yet still I want the people of that place to do well... for two reasons I guess: 1) I just simply want everyone on this earth to do well, no matter what country they're citizens to and 2) because the people I left behind, a lot of them were family, friends. I knew them well, I still keep in touch with them. They're still among my closest friends. I want them to live the remainder of their lives peacefully, happily, prosperously.

I know that you've got a somewhat similar background story as me... you/your family left Bangladesh for a better life. You were lucky in that you were privileged enough to have the means to get out of that place -- you know that a good half of the country did not. So, what about the people still there... surely you care a non-zero amount for their welfare. Right? We live in an interconnected world. Our actions, business decisions, political decisions have an effect on the entire world -- sometimes it's good, sometimes it isn't. An argument could be made that there are people out there in the world who are not doing well because of something that our country did. Right now you have Obama on a tour trying to drum up support for a war. His main reasoning is that America is the police of the world... 400 children were supposedly gassed, and so we have to step in to stop this injustice. There are injustices of different kinds being perpetrated in other countries... what makes them so different from Syria, that they don't deserve our help?

I can understand prioritizing ... first comes the welfare of our own American citizens, and then the rest of the world... but completely ignoring the other world seems like a cruel and selfish thing to do. How is this not obvious?

There is a difference between caring about people in other countries, and declaring nations irrelevant and everyone "global citizens." I'm all for foreign aid, international development, etc, but that doesn't mean giving up on the concept of liberal democracies animated by specific bodies politic tied together by national unity.

There is nothing empowering about the concept of "global citizenship." The marginalization of nation-states just means that there is truly nothing to stand up to the trans-national corporations and global capital owners. There is nothing to stop everything from becoming one big race to the bottom.

> There is nothing empowering about the concept of "global citizenship."

I think there is, I think it's a beautiful thought. It seems to me that the big challenges for the centuries ahead include problems with the planet... like global warming, pollution, ecosystems not working out right. Solving these problems will require intimate coordination among many big nations. If we start acting with greater cohesion, if we understand that global warming is as much of a concern (or should be) to a guy living in Arkansas as it is to a guy living in China, we can probably solve these problems more effectively. Mind you I'm not advocating erasing all country-lines right now, I just think there's probably a good balance between the two extremes. We probably weren't ready for the transition to happen a few decades ago, but now we are a little bit. I think/hope this continues.

> The marginalization of nation-states just means that there is truly nothing to stand up to the trans-national corporations and global capital owners.

As if that's not the reality right now...

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