On Sat, 6 Aug 2005, Doug Henwood wrote:
> So it seems to me the concept of citizenship is much more loaded in a
> socialist or social democratic environment; it's not only a matter of
> voting or running for office, it also entitles one to a rich set of
> material benefits. I don't see how they can avoid making a bigger deal out
> of citizenship than more laissez-faire democracies.
I said before I couldn't find anything in reality that corresponded to this idea. I think I suddenly realized where the flaw is. Material benefits don't force you to be strict about citizenship. What they force you to be strict about is *tax collection.*
But nothing stops from you from collecting from illegals (or from having it cheated on by legals.) As we all know, not only do most illegals in the US pay taxes, the US actually makes a tax profit off them, because most never get their due benefits in social security & medicare.
And I imagine the relative loss would be even smaller in countries which get a major portion of their taxes from VAT, which are harder to evade than income taxes. And which have a more muscular and instrusive regulatory state in general.
(During my brief stint in sociology I remember being laughed at by a Swedish sociologist because by his standards, it was impossible to have true random sample in America -- all our methodological sophistications were to him simply attempts to make up for our basic deficiency. In Sweden, according to him, all 8.5 million people or whatever were on one registered roll they were quite sure was complete. If they had an address, the state knew the names of the people who received mail there, paid bills there, etc. And every residence had a phone. So all you needed was a random number generator.)
Michael