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Why should a Nation confer identity?
Think of it from an analogy of the corporate world. Some companies attract talent by paying them a lot of money. Some do it by fostering an identity; "We are all a family here". I think to very many people it's evident that the former is a more 'honest' portrayal of the transaction/relation than the latter. If anything it's a meme that companies that tout a "family environment" are to be avoided because they are probably shortchanging you in what you want mostly from them, money.
In the same vein, why shouldn't a nation be just a place you live in? If you look at immigration trends (revealed preferences), its not that people want to move to the countries that give them the strongest national identity, but the countries that give them the best place to live in. I'm pretty sure more people want to move to America than China.
Buying into any form of national loyalty means the nation can effectively have an easier time short changing you, they can send you to the trenches, they can loot you of your earnings and yada yada.
In short; Why shouldn't a market system apply when choosing a place to live? Why not have competition in this domain? I think putting national identity above how good it is to live in a nation is putting the cart before the horse. Is voting with your feet/money not that much more powerful than just voting?
Why should anything confer identity? Why shouldn't it.
Your whole argument boils down to "what's in it for me?" the obvious counter-argument is "what's in it for anyone?"
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This is your position disguised as your opponents' position.
"Companies are not really like families" doesn't mean that families aren't real. It means that families that are as easy to change as changing your company, aren't real. And you're the one in favor of easy changes.
I don't see how its in contradiction to what I said. I am stating quite precisely that your nation should be easy to change. Because under that system Nations have an impetus to not shortchange their citizens (residents) too much.
Loyalty to a Nation is well and good if you actually like you Country. The founding fathers were loyal to America for the same reasons they were disloyal to England.
As an individual who wants to live a good life "fuck you I'm leaving" is much more appealing to me than "I'll stay here and fight with everything I have to make it better".
I can go fight and make somewhere else better. Respect should be bidirectional after all. Why be loyal to that who wrongs you? Would you be singing the same tune were you a part of a nation that hated you and your values?
But your company is easy to change. And as you point out, when a company claims to be loyal like a family, it's trying to shortchange you.
This is directly contradictory to your point. You think that when it's easy to change, the citizens are not shortchanged, but your own company example is one where it's easy to change and the citizen-equivalents are shortchanged after all.
Sure its not a given that ease of leaving/entering is 100% correlated to how much X can get away with extracting B from Y. Or "shortchaging" B.
But I brought up that example to convey that when something that when A implicitly wants more from you than what you agreed to, A is probably giving you less of what you agreed to get from A.
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This is simultaneously obviously true core of the dispute. Having said "fuck you I'm leaving" what consideration do the latter owe the former other than their enmity. Go away, we don't want you. We will not die in that man's company, that fears to die with us.
The latter doesn't owe the former anything.
Taxes were used in exchange or welfare/infrastructure/protection. Those are the concrete things that are being traded, anything else is abstract.
It might be a very useful narrative if the citizens of a nation do believe that they owe something more to a nation than what they already pay in taxes, some kind of loyalty. It might even be good for the individuals because it forces the group to stay around and improve things other than leaving.
But some countries are so far gone, and an individuals life is so short relative to institutional change that I can't in good faith suggest to anyone "just stay and make your country better bro".
If my friend laments to me that this country sucks, I won't tell him to stay around and potentially waste half of his life just voting and campaigning harder, I'd suggest him to leave to somewhere that better fits his values.
Much like marriages, some of them are better when fixed through perseverance and some of them are better when dissolved, I'm not going to ask a battered wife of a drunkard just to stay around and make the marriage better, I'll tell her to leave.
Precisely, and so I ask you the same question I asked @hustlegrinder. If the only governing principle is "what's in it for me" and all you have to offer is the value of your stuff why shouldn't they just take your stuff?
Because that's something you can only get away with so many times before no more stuff is being made? I'm sure this is not the steelman of your question, but I think my answer to that is already embedded in my previous comment.
Answer me this? What option is better if a country truly royally sucks? Or what would you tell a friend who finds his country unbearable. Don't imagine he lives in the US, or Canada or Germany. Imagine he lives in cartel territory in Mexico.
My ideal allows those who love their countries and those who don't an option. Just because you have the option to leave doesn't mean you need to exercise it.
Your ideal is to treat people as interchangeable cogs in the economic machine. Components to be removed and replaced as one sees fit.
I do not share this ideal.
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What do we define as "shortchanging"? Restrictions under the law? Or just feeling like you aren't respected?
Someone could make the cheap counterargument that any corporate actor could just leave a country that has strict and well-enforced laws around dumping and pollution.
In addition, one could also argue that we have seen what happens when countries are sorted across values (India/Pakistan, the Balkan nations). Who is to say that nations becoming Red-Tribe-istan and Blue-Tribe-istan is possible, or even good?
I'm aware of Scott's Archipelago, but I also suspect it might only work in a world that doesn't have any historical context/baggage associated with our real-life one.
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Why should then the family system apply to families? Mothers only taking of their children, if someone pays them to. Likewise, children abandoning their parents in old age feeling no loyalty towards them or siblings treating eachother purely as fellow market participants.
If market is the provides superior outcomes, merely abolition of nation is insufficient to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number, any non-market system must end.
Because you are already in a transactional relationship with a modern state where you pay taxes. You pay taxes for legal system/infrastructure/protection/etc.
If the country wants something more from you, your loyalty, then they should give something equivalent to that in return, which they are incapable of giving. Unlike in a family where children are capable of returning what their parents gave them.
I genuinely can't think a country ever returning that favor minus maybe hostage situations in a foreign land where the hostages went voluntarily.
Even a cursory examination of the world outside our windows proves proves this statement false. Outside some absurd scenario such as a child sacrificing their lives to save both of their parents, no, the child is not capable of returning what their parents gave them because what they gave them was life itself.
You say the state is incapable of loyalty, and while in some abstract sense you might be right, every day we see agents of the state, soldiers, cops, firefighters, EMS, Et Al risking their necks for people they don't know. How do you reconcile this? Do you dismiss such people as "suckers", or you honestly believe think your tax dollars are worth the risk that a father of 3 might not live to see his kids graduate, get married, etc...? Do you believe that your tax dollars are worth more than somebody else's husband, wife, son, or daughter? I don't see how you couldn't given your previous statements. If on the other hand you don't would you allow that to stop you from calling 911 if your building was on fire?
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