I left it intentionally ambiguous about my own opinions on the topic, as I am not interested in a nationalistic debate about my own views, as they aren't relevant here. (If you'd like to take an easy guess at them and discuss further, my email's in my profile.)

I just wanted to draw attention to the fact that whether something is wasteful or not is a value judgement in a lot of ways, and that there aren't usually one size fits all answers for all members of a society when it comes to value judgments, especially for a potentially multiplanetary society.

Nations are great. Not everyone agrees on all policies. My personal opinion is that I do not want to live in a censored or communist country (Such as China). Having borders and different countries allows multiple ideas to exist and folks can choose where to live.

> folks can choose where to live.

This is absolutely not true in practice, even for rich people fortunate/lucky enough to be born in a place where they receive a passport with lots of options.

For the 99% of the other humans, it's even worse.

That doesn't appear to be a defect inherent to nations since there seems to be a pretty even split between free and non-free nations[0] Rather, it seems to be a problem of bad governance, corruption, ineffective or non-existent institutions, etc. My reason for favouring a world with many nations is that failures of those varieties are generally limited by the borders of the nations in which they occur. A world with a single governing body is a world with a single point of failure.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices#:~:tex....