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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBillionaires like Peter Thiel get citizenship abroad so they can run from the problems they create
by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian at Quartz Media
https://qz.com/894754/peter-thiels-new-zealand-citizenship-billionaires-get-citizenship-abroad-so-they-can-run-from-the-problems-they-create/
"SNIP...........
Its one thing for a wealthy private citizen to buy herself options to make traveling, living, and working abroad easier. Hypocrisy among Trumps inner circleand indeed, in all contemporary American politicsis hardly breaking news. And the irony of a Trump confidante revealing himself to be a rootless globalist is admittedly delectable. Its also not all that surprising: Trumps pick for trade secretary, Robert Lighthizer, has attended the Davos World Economic Forum 15 times.
The fact that Thiel can easily run away from the very rules and regulations hell be helping Trump shape, however, is not funny in the least. Thiel is in a position of immense power as Trumps advisor. His opinions will affect some 300 million Americans, most of whom who do not have a backup passportor indeed, even the funds for a plane ticket abroad. The ease with which Thiel can opt out of American society speaks to the very concerns that conservatives themselves have voiced about the denationalized Davos man for decades. When Samuel Huntington worried in 2004 that Americas elites were seceding, he could have easily been talking about Thielor any number of Trumps cabinet appointees, for that matter.
It is the current system of passports and nations and states, along with moralistic attitudes about patriotism, that enables the rich to opt out.
On the surface, there seem to be immense contradictions between the nationalist, populist, protectionist rhetoric that Trump spouts and the acquisitive globalism of a Peter Thiel type. But these twin ideologies coalesce in a mutually supportive way. Trump said in a December speech that there is no world currency, no world flag, and no world passport. Thats true. But the continued primacy of the nation-state is precisely why the practice of sovereignty hacking or jurisdiction shopping, as exemplified by citizenship-by-investment programs and offshore tax registries, has become so prevalent among those who can afford it. Picking and choosing residencies, citizenships, and tax regimes helps the wealthy exist as though the world had no borders at all, which means they can throw their support behind nationalist policies that will close off options to everyone else. It is the current system of passports and nations and states, along with moralistic attitudes about patriotism, that enables the rich to opt out.
Thiel knows this world very, very well. In fact, Thiel apparently found the concept of hacking sovereignty so compelling that in 2008, he gave his personal and financial support to the Seasteading Institute, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco that promotes the creation of artificial floating nations in international waters. The political philosophy behind seasteading can be summed up as follows:
Governments are bad
Governments are bad
Governments have a monopoly on sovereignty
Governments would be less bad if they had to compete on the open market with each other for capital, companies, citizens, and ideas
No one can compete with governments because governments control the worlds land
The only spaces that arent controlled by existing governments are in international waters
Creating lots of new countries in international waters will increase competition and make all governments better
.............SNIP"
applegrove
(118,696 posts)hilly places like New Zealand than will not drown with climate change. A place with low elevation to the sea and no functioning government.
dalton99a
(81,516 posts)gratuitous
(82,849 posts)"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."