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Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

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Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#331

Post by zamnos »

mikem170 wrote: post #297
WaitWaitWha wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original post I was asking for further details is about borders, not passport. That said, passports have been around near as long as borders, just did not have the smart chip embedded in them. Letters of recommendations or safe passage to pass a port have been around nearly as long as the notion of sovereign boundaries. It might have been a parchment with a wax seal, a ring, or a stick with a burn-mark, maybe eve…

I saw that there were passport documents for safety in the past, like you mentioned. I've also heard of documents called passports being used to grant foreigners permission to conduct commerce, and others allowing locals to move between provinces within a country. I wonder about borders, too. I wonder when they started guarding borders like they do today. I know there were places with minimal border control, like the…

In medieval times, the border was the wall that had armed guards on it to keep invaders out and the peasants in, so there's precedent there. Everyone lived their lives inside that wall unless their king allowed them to leave. Not allowing someone to leave without permission was documented all the way back to the Romans, in 27 BC when Augustus did not let senators go to the new Roman state, Egypt.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#332

Post by kevviiinn »

rayiner wrote: post #320
legitster wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this not just pure, racist nationalism? Where you live is not a family. If you are born unlucky geographically it seems like you should absolutely have the right to improve your lot.

“Racism” is where southern white people don’t like southern black people despite being from the same place and sharing highly overlapping culture, religion, and values. When you’re talking about different groups of people from different cultures that’s not “racism.” My parents, who grew up in Bangladesh, an extremely hierarchical and traditional society, couldn’t be more different from my wife’s parents, who are desc…

If that's true then why does anyone immigrate anywhere

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#333

Post by chewz »

mannerheim wrote: post #204
chewz wrote: post #179

That was true until end of XIX century. Especially so in XIX century. For a person a move was quite simple, sometimes just few miles over the border. But moving a business, brick-and-mortar business like coal-mine or brewery was hard. That kept personal taxes low and business taxes high. But XX century changed that.

People forget that modern nation states are a very recent, post-democratic construct, and in the past, states competed for people all the time; the fact that these people spoke a different language and had a different ethnicity mattered little to a monarch who themselves might not have belonged to the ethnicity of the country they ruled. Hence the Prussians bringing Poles to work on the farms in Silesia abandoned by…

Also Germans moving from say Kassel to Hanover or Silesia to Ruhr, or Vienna to Berlin. Very low threshold - same language, culture but lower taxes or better opportunities.

Or Poles moving from Galicia (now Western Ukraine) to Argentina or Chicago.

At the time it wasn't possible to keep citizens tied within borders so higher personal taxes were impractical.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#334

Post by philwelch »

lesuorac wrote: post #261
stale2002 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only if by "secure" you mean prevent your population from leaving Did you think about this statement for even 1 second? It should be clearly and immediately obvious that it is easier to leave places like the US than it is to enter it. This is obviously the case. You cannot with a straight face claim that actually it is easier to enter the US than leave. Clearly, leaving is easier.

There are 4x [1] the amount of people that annually enter the US than have passports issued [2]. It is in fact, 4x easier to enter the US than to leave. Passports are actually rare for a US citizen to have, you just live in a bubble. [1]: https://www.trade.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/Fact%20She... [2]: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/about-us/reports-...

That doesn’t mean it’s easier to enter the US than to leave. The US is a desirable place to live, so not many people leave while lots of people want to come here.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#335

Post by bakuninsbart »

maxsilver wrote: post #238
hermannj314 wrote: post #16

I've owned houses in two cities in my life. One called itself "A developer-friendly community" and the other "A healthy community" The cities were organized around their taglines. One was 300 years old and focused on parks, trails, conservancy, and community centers. The other a younger city focused on growth and sprawl, tax abatements, and new businesses. You should live where the government aligns with your phase o…

> You should live where the government aligns with your phase of life and personal goals and be free to choose a new government later. It should be noted that while this is good advice, this is a big luxury to have, and not something that is broadly applicable to most people. If you don't have the money, if your career is tied to a specific industry, if you have children from any past-and-now-divorced marriage, or a…

> Yes, move somewhere new if you can and you feel the grass is greener. But municipal government absolutely owe it to their residents and community to support the people they have, not just the people they wish they had.

I'm living in a district subject to heavy gentrification at the moment. (And as I'm transitioning from student to Yuppie, I'm part of it) The conflicts between newly moved in rich people and the entrenched working class are intense, and looking at other places it is incredibly obvious who is going to win.

The process of moving to a place, then expecting that place to cater to you needs over the people who originally lived there seems deeply problematic to me: Considering the power dynamics at place, the process as a whole is a really mean way of punching down.

Just to give one concrete example, there was a bar close by that basically served as a living room for many of the neighbors. The people living above me are 5 in 2 rooms, obviously they need the space. But there were noise complains, the police came (never used to even come out 10y ago, and lawyers were used). The bar closed, a fashion store moved in, there are of course other bars but they are much more expensive, the staff doesn't speak german and the community largely consists of academics and expats.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#336

Post by bluGill »

comte7092 wrote: post #282
bluGill wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends. Factory work is often attracted to a dieing town in the middle of nowhere they can scoup up cheap labor that is just skilled enough. You can only get your factory so large doing this though, but there are towns of 5-10k people that fit the bill just fine for manufacturing cheap in the US.

Yes indeed, however that isn’t really an economic development model most would want to hold up as an ideal.

Those small towns won't get anything better and know it do they consider it their best possible model.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#337

Post by JeremyNT »

rayiner wrote: post #317
JeremyNT wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's just say that many of these people do not value the things that I find important and vice versa. Many are here because of the lack of income tax, the country music industry, and the extremely culturally conservative government. They either do not care about the poor public transit/services/infrastructure/schools/etc or they do not care enough to outweigh the benefits. A common refrain I hear when talking to peo…

> Many are here because of the lack of income tax, the country music industry, and the extremely culturally conservative government. > A common refrain I hear when talking to people is that they wanted to move somewhere that wasn't so "woke." What’s wrong with people sorting into places that are culturally compatible? After all plenty of people move to Paris for the culture. > They either do not care about the poor p…

> What’s wrong with people sorting into places that are culturally compatible? After all plenty of people move to Paris for the culture.

This was literally the gp's thesis, that it's easier to just leave than to try and improve things (for whatever your value of improve is).

I agree it's the logical thing to do, but when definitions of what services a government should provide vary greatly and people sort where they live based on them, it's going to lead to strange results.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#338

Post by pnt12 »

RhysU wrote: post #315
maxsilver wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You should live where the government aligns with your phase of life and personal goals and be free to choose a new government later. It should be noted that while this is good advice, this is a big luxury to have, and not something that is broadly applicable to most people. If you don't have the money, if your career is tied to a specific industry, if you have children from any past-and-now-divorced marriage, or a…

> But municipal government absolutely owe it to their residents and community to support the people they have, not just the people they wish they had. Within reason, supporting the people you wish you had, instead of the people you have, is called leadership. It is how we progress as a species.

What kind of democracy is that?

"thanks for your vote, for your taxes, for your contributions to the community, now fuck off"

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#339

Post by kevviiinn »

rayiner wrote: post #312
indigochill wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a couple interesting assumptions here: 1. There's such a thing as a true nation 2. That how long a person's family has lived in a region should entitle them to keep others out The first one is bound to wander into circuitous philosophical debate, but I'm curious what the rationale is for the second.

If you believe that people and cultures are different (which almost everyone outside America believes) then it follows that a region reflects the people who developed it. Countries are, of course, not just land, but they are built of infrastructure, governments, institutions, culture, customs, rules, norms, and values. If Iowa is polite, flat, and egalitarian it’s because Iowans made it that way. By contrast India or…

You seem to think that people are never influenced by outside sources such as wealthy capital owners spreading propaganda in Iowa in order to make it the way the capital owner wants. I know you'll say "oh people can make choices for themselves" but that's not how behavior works especially when avenues of information are so highly controlled

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#340

Post by tptacek »

rayiner wrote: post #320
legitster wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this not just pure, racist nationalism? Where you live is not a family. If you are born unlucky geographically it seems like you should absolutely have the right to improve your lot.

“Racism” is where southern white people don’t like southern black people despite being from the same place and sharing highly overlapping culture, religion, and values. When you’re talking about different groups of people from different cultures that’s not “racism.” My parents, who grew up in Bangladesh, an extremely hierarchical and traditional society, couldn’t be more different from my wife’s parents, who are desc…

No, racially-motivated prejudice in either direction between your parents and your wife's parents is, in fact, also racism, despite the fact that neither group was born in the south or has "overlapping culture". Xenophobia is a form of racism; globally, it's probably the most common form.
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