A thread in another forum included a link to private islands for sale. This brought back a series of conversations from several years ago.
Many of my friends either own their own companies or are highly placed in existing corporations. A few years ago (over beer) we began discussing the possibility of pooling our funds, buying our own private island, and turning our new (but tiny) nation into an industrial marvel – we would govern it our way.
Practicality eventually convinced us that such a venture would likely ruin us all – being an island, we’d need someplace for the workers to live, and people tend to have families, and families tend not to like living in dorms; greed or the simple desire to stay on our feet financially would eventually cause us to cut corners and go lax on our initial desire to be environment-friendly; even though we could buy a private island, even a large one, they all seem to already belong to one country or another, so we couldn’t actually form our own nation.
No, we couldn’t. Not enough money, not enough influence.
However, what is to stop several very wealthy, very powerful corporations from doing exactly what my little group of drinking buddies wanted to do? Could Exxon Mobil, General Motors, Ford Motor, General Electric, Chevron Texaco, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard*** get together and form their own small, heavily indusrialized nation, and (importantly) be governed only by whatever laws they, themselves, enacted-- possibly doing away with those pesky Workers’ Rights laws, envrionmental mandates, and income taxes?
***[sub] names randomly collected from Fortune.com’s Top 20 list[/sub]
Thanks for the help, Shagnasty. That was a very interesting column and thread (especially the bits about Sealand).
Still, though, those mostly concern Joe Blow and his Merry Men, who don’t have serious money, influence with world leaders, and a large team of lawyers. Someone in the thread you linked to said that it’s better to stage a takeover with a clipboard than with a rifle, and that’s pretty much what I’m asking – if those with some of the biggest clipboards in the world wanted to do it, could they? And could they be successful at it?
If they could, why haven’t they tried it yet (though that gets into Great Debates territiory, I think)?
(1) Pretty much all the land on Earth is part of an existing country’s territory (except for Antarctica, for which countries have agreed to suspend any territorial claims). So you’d have to get the country that claimed your territory to give up its claim in your favour.
(2) You’d need to get other countries to accept your status as a country, so thatr theyt recognise your ability to enact laws, issue passports, collect taxes, etc.
Without other countries recognising you as a country, as soon as you do something that offends them enough, they’ll send in their police and/or military to enforce your laws. So you need enough military strength to make that not worth their while.
The best way to do it would be to buy/bribe the government of some existing third-world country, and use that country as your base for economic world domination. If your program was to industrialise the country, and spread a bit of the wealth among the general population, you’d probably get popular support for the venture as well.