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Comment by natvert | Hacker News Reader

When the benefits of creating a new country outweigh the costs (to shareholders), does it fall within the fiduciary duty of corporate leaders to form a new country?

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I'm curious if the world-at-large would recognize a corporate country though. A country is only a country if other countries recognize it as such.

I wouldn't be surprised if you only needed one country to do it and then could funnel all your taxes through that complicit country. If that happened we would be back at the double Irish with an extra step. Forcing all participants to recognize the same countries could have all kinds of good or bad side effects especially when you consider China and Taiwan.

Why would a corporation want a country?

If you don’t control the planet you’re just waiting for your competitors to crush you.

Corporate motives can usually be reduced to one of three things: cheap (ideally free/forced) labor, cheap resources, and limits on liability.

Monopolize markets.

Hahaha, and then be saddled with paying for defence infrastructure and education?"

Plenty of tiny nations already solved this problem by contracting other nations instead of building their own defense infrastructure. Granted it's not free either but much cheaper than building your own.

How many days until I'm a tax-paying citizen of Amazon.com Inc.?

The many perks of a Prime membership!

It seems at some point, it's in shareholder interest to run wars and black ops against foreign corponations. And then we've gone full cyberpunk.

I thought part of the plan is that non-complying countries get sanctions/tarrifs applied so your plan wouldn't be viable?

It's not my plan, nor am I advocating for it. I just think it's a potential in the logical progression of events.

To your point though, what if a few or even all Fortune n companies formed countries (or one country together). Who would the sanctions really hurt/benefit? I doubt it would hurt the corporate nation states as much as the others.

I doubt all fortune 500 companies would just accept losing access to the markets of 130 countries, so I'm guessing you're talking about tariffs rather than sanctions (which imply a total ban). In that case it would depend on how punitive the tariffs are. If they're not punitive enough then you're right, companies might just deal with the tariffs in which case the corporate tax gets turned into a tax (assuming mot of the countries are in on it. If it's punitive enough (ie. it's better to pay the local corporate tax than to pay the tariffs) then you'd expect competitors to break ranks to gain a competitive advantage.

A corporate country. Is that a dictatorship of the shareholders?

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