The views expressed herein are solely those of the writer.
By Tpriddie
Let’s be honest about commerce: profits drive every economic transaction. When a wealthy investor trades cash for a passport, the math is simple—they have already calculated the return on investment, whether it is a tax advantage, mobility, or prestige, exceeding what they’re giving up. Fair enough. We can hardly fault someone for shopping around.
What’s amusing is watching serious people defend the Citizenship by Investment (CBI) programs with a straight face, insisting everyone wins. The money, they tell us earnestly, funds teachers and hospitals, local infrastructure, etc. It’s Robin Hood with a briefcase! Taking money from the rich, distributing it to the poor, and nobody gets hurt.
Except, well, the Robin Hood scheme never quite worked as advertised, did it? And the “rob Peter to pay Paul” model runs into an obvious limitation: Peters are a finite resource. Meanwhile, the actual beneficiaries—the lawyers drafting contracts, the consultants facilitating deals, the lobbyists defending the programs—are making out rather handsomely. The rest of us? We’re told to wait and trust that some of those dollars will eventually trickle down to our schools and clinics. Eventually, of course, we wait and wait because God will provide. Then we complain.
There’s a famous experiment where you offer a monkey a choice: one banana now, or a dollar bill. The monkey grabs the banana every time, blissfully unaware that the dollar could buy a whole bunch of bananas. You can’t really blame the monkey—it lacks the cognitive framework or simply refuses to try to understand currency.
Governments, apparently, face a similar limitation. Confronted with long-term economic development or immediate cash injection, they grab the metaphorical banana with both hands. It’s the Abilene Paradox in a closed-door meeting: everyone agrees to implement a program nobody actually believes in, because everyone assumes everyone else wants it. The short-term thinking wins, everyone celebrates, and nobody wants to ask that uncomfortable question: what exactly did we just sell, and was the price worth it?
Don’t misunderstand me—there’s something darkly entertaining about watching citizenship become just another product item in a global marketplace. Passports as products. Nations as vendors. Belonging as a purchasable commodity. It’s absurd enough to be funny, at least until you remember what we’re actually trading away.
The lawyers, naturally, are laughing all the way to the bank. The rest of us might want to at least crack a smile before the joke gets old.
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