Alex Chiu has a vision of World Peace. Here is his idea: incorporating the world into a business where the people are shareholders.
read his plan here:
http://alexchiu.com/philosophy/corp.htm
After reading this, my gut-level reaction is to say that it’s an outrageously silly idea, and would never work. But I’m not a historian or political scientist, so I’m a bit unsure how to validate this opinion. However, I know there a bunch of political and economist types out there in Doperland, so tell me, what are the problems with his theory? What are the holes in the logic? Is the basic idea a decent plan in theory?
(please, minimize discussion about Alex Chiu. Everything that can be said about him has already been said, and there are any number of websites already dedicated to what a nut he is. I’m really much more curious about this “World Corporation” idea, and how it holds up under scrutiny.)
Corporations have a Board, who make decisions on a majoritarian basis. In this case, the Board of the World Corporation is the governments of its nation states (who may or may not be democratically elected).
And so he is suggesting a World Board in which governments make decisions which affect the entire enterprise. Guess what?
It already exists.
At the moment, each subsidiary is acting almost solely in its own interests, and utterly ignoring any decisions of the Board. Put like this, I suspect dear Alex might realise he’s bitten off more than he can Chiu.
Let’s just say that the intellect that came up with this idea is consistant with the style of the illustrations he used to explain it.
In complete seriousness, it would be pointless to list the unworkable parts of his idea. It’s much easier to adress the workable parts- there are none.
Why would anybody accept the plan? What would the citizens of these countries have to gain? Why would any leader accept it? Chiu says that these leaders would become wealthy (without ever explaining where the money would come from), but I can’t see the leaders of the USA, Russia, etc selling the indepence of their country for money- especially when they would almost certainly be assasinated before they could spend it. The president of any democracy doesn’t have the power to accept the terms of the plan anyway. Giving up ownership of the military and radically restructuring the government would require the actions of congress, the parliament, etc.
Chiu never explains where the corporation’s profits come from. He suggests that they are from taxes. How is it the corporation is able to build roads, fund schools etc and have money left over to pay stockholders?
How could you simply shuffle the armed forces to different countries? Leaving aside issues of personnel transport, you still have soldiers in a country they’re unfamiliar with, they don’t speak the language etc. Either transport costs go up as every vehicle and plane are also moved, or you have US soldiers who trained and worked on US tanks having to be trained on Chinese tanks.
Chiu has this fantasy that nations will cheerfully give up their soveriegnty. Look at the UN. It ain’t gonna happen.
Profits from taxes? Next up, Chiu’s perpetual motion machine…
Hey, guys, this thread reminds me: When was the last time we were visited by the Alex Chiu Spam Machine?