On Wed, Aug 14, 2002 at 01:24:12PM -0400, Robin Hanson wrote: > Imagine that a nation like the US were run like a corporation. To live > (and vote) here, you'd have to own a share. You could sell your share and > leave, and foreigners could come if they bought a share. The corporate > management would be given financial incentives to maximize the market value > of these shares. They could issue more shares if these new shares were > handed out to previous share holders in proportion to the shares they > currently hold.
This seems very similar to having a poll tax, with the following twists: 1. You can voluntarily pay a higher tax and get proportionally more votes. 2. Management is given incentives to maximize revenue from poll taxes. (Other forms of taxes can be collected but management does not have direct incentives based on their revenues.) They're similar in the sense that they look the same to people who have access to perfect capital markets. I'm not sure how much this helps in analyzing Robin's proposal, but at least it gives a different approach to thinking about the problem. My variant may be an improvement since it allows people who would benefit most by living in the U.S. to enter even if they do not have access to credit. One effect that becomes apparent in my variant is that management would want to make income taxes more progressive and use the revenue to subsidize the poor so that they can afford to pay a higher poll tax. I think the effect carries over to Robin's system - subsidizing the poor at the expense of the rich increases the total market value of the shares. More generally, management would want to subsidize the marginal shareholder-residents at the expense of the non-marginal shareholder-residents. This amounts to de facto price discrimination even though all shares supposedly have the same price on the open market. On Wed, Aug 14, 2002 at 04:50:19PM -0400, Robin Hanson wrote: > Are state-enforced lawsuits really what keeps large multinational > corporations honest now? If not, then the concept here is to use > mechanisms similar to whatever large corporations now use. One factor that keeps large corporations honest is the threats of hostile takeovers and bankruptcy. Unfortunately neither of these seem likely to apply to a large nation-as-corporation. Imagine creditors trying to force everyone else to leave the U.S. after a bankruptcy because they now own all of the shares.
