Citizenship: an archaic practice that should be made obsolete

The issue of immigration reform is moot because citizenship is an archaic practice.
It is the last vestige of medieval governance where the individual is property of the state.
It promotes unnecessary rivalries and discrimination between people groups and forces employers to make irrational decisions with regards to hiring practices.
Citizenship is the way by which the state keeps tabs on who exists, how much they have and how much can be taken.
The state identifies the number of citizens and their income by means of a census.
It then uses this data to conduct an income tax under the auspices of paying for programs that, albeit poorly, improve the lives of the under-privileged.
In actuality, these social programs create a sort of black hole for money by hiring people to do work that ultimately produces nothing.
Similarly, when citizens reach the age of eighteen years they are required to sign up for selective service, a practice that exists solely to allow for a draft should the government ever decide to reinstate it.
And what is the draft but a way of the government telling the citizen, “You are not your own person, and you do not own your life.
Your life is ours and there is nothing you can say about it.”
Even if someone is morally opposed to conflict, they are forced to act against their conscience and fight according to the whims of those in power.
Citizenship is, then, a sacrifice of one’s ethics in favor of the state’s desires.
Governments that practice citizenship ultimately deny the belief that rights are given to people as individuals and exist apart from the state.
Q.E.D., when a government will allow a citizen the right to a fair trial by his peers, but denies to give a prisoner of war the same option, they are disregarding their allegedly-held principles that all men are created equal and are endowed with certain unalienable rights.
It can be said that citizenship creates a sort of arbitrary favoritism for one group over another, basically denying the humanity of the latter.
It is possible to reform our current system that implements citizenship.
The first step is to eliminate the income tax and replace it with a national sales tax.
Then, at the same time, eliminate the minimum wage system.
The reason why it is currently preferable for employers to hire non-citizens is because they do not have to report what they make to the government for the sake of withholding taxes.
This, then, makes their employees invisible to the state and can then be paid below minimum wage.
If the income tax is eliminated, everyone, resident and alien alike, will all have to pay taxes with no way to dodge them.
With the minimum wage gone, all potential employees are placed on an equal playing field and their job qualifications will determine if they are hired, not how easily their boss can evade the law by hiring them.
The second step to burying the policy of citizenship is to end selective service.
People should not be subject to the whims of the government, especially if those whims require them to sacrifice their life.
The government should return to a policy of volunteering for military service. Only those whose consciences allow it should have to fight.
The replacement for citizenship should be a system of residency-based programs.
If someone wants a driver’s license, it should be designated to them based on where they live.
When voting, each resident should be issued a voter ID relative to where they live.
A nation is made up of the people who choose to live there.
There should be no unnecessary hoops to jump through simply to gain the right to work and vote in a country where one already resides.
Many people desire to live in the United States because of the freedoms and opportunities we purportedly have.
They should not be turned away because they don’t want to be made property of the state.
In a truly free society, there is no citizenship. Everyone is his own man.

Comments and questions  about this column can be emailed to Rosstripi@gmail.com.