Translate the passages begins with "But, just for the sake of argument ..." into Chinese.
Money isn’t restricted by borders, so why are people?
Giles Fraser
Theresa May won’t be around in the early 22nd century
when, according to Star Trek at least, Dr Emory Erickson will have invented the
transporter – a device that will be able to dematerialise a person into an
energy pattern, beam them to another place or planet, and then rematerialise
them back again. In such a world people will be able to move as quickly and
freely as an email.
The philosopher Derek Parfit has rightly questioned
whether such a thing is even philosophically possible: will the rematerialised
person be the same person as the dematerialised one, or just a perfect copy.
(What would happen if two copies of me were rematerialised? Would they both be
me?) Parfit thus raises a fascinating philosophical question about what we mean
by personal identity – or what makes me me.
But, just for the sake of argument, imagine what such
a device would do to Mrs May’s keep-them-all-out immigration policy. With the
transporter, there could be no border controls and no restrictions on the free
movement of individuals.
Economic migrants would love it. People will be able
to live and work where they like, beaming instantly from Syria to Sussex or
indeed to Saturn. And because of this, the whole concept of the nation state
will eventually wither away. People will have become more powerful than the
state.
Fanciful? Of course. Forget about the technical
problems. The fundamental problem is that human beings are not fungible. A copy
is not the same as its original. A person cannot be dematerialised into a series
of digital zeros and ones, get beamed over space and be rematerialised as the
same person.
But – and here is the really big thing – money can
be. For the whole point about money is that it is fungible. It can be converted
into zeros and ones and it can be digitally shot across space. And since the
late 1970s, when capital controls were relaxed all around the world, and then
even more so since the digital revolution, money has been able to go where it
pleases, unimpeded, without any need for a passport or reference to border
control. Every day, trillions of dollars are economic migrants, crossing
boundaries as if they didn’t exist, pouring in and out of countries looking for
the most economically advantageous place to be. And, just as with the fanciful
people-transporter example, this free movement of capital is how the nation
state is dissolving.
This week the OECD published a report on
international companies and tax avoidance. Big companies like AstraZeneca are
able to pay next to no tax in the UK because they just transport their profits
to a low-tax regime in another country. Indeed, some countries, pathetically
prostrating themselves before the gods of finance, exist for little other than
this purpose. And so the situation we find ourselves in is that money is free to
travel as it pleases but people are not. We have got used to this as the new
normal, and it largely goes unremarked. Yes, there are a few on the libertarian
fringe who recognise this as a contradiction and argue that people should be as
free as capital. But the majority on the right do everything they can to protect
the free movement of capital and restrict the free movement of people.
Which is why the neoliberal right in Britain has
utterly contradictory instincts over Europe – they want the free trade bit but
they don’t want the free people bit. And they scare us with how the free
movement of people threatens our national identity but refuse to face the fact
that the free movement of capital can be seen as doing exactly the same. They
talk a good game about the importance of freedom: but it’s one rule for capital
and another for people.
Of course the transporter won’t happen. But with the
internet, the imagination can travel where it will. And that means poor people
will always see and want what rich people have. And not even Mrs May will be
able to stop them crossing dangerous seas and borders to find it.