Important Countries

I think there's a lot to be said for the idea that corporations are anti-competitive. As they let individuals limit their liability for the results of their investments, they encourage unaccounted for externalities (which business insurance accounts for to some extent, but only within limits). A corporation can pollute as much as it likesm for decades at a time, and shareholders can keep taking dividends. If it does get prosecuted, the only people who lose out are the people holding shares at the time, and then their liability is restricted to the value of their investment. Better to use organisational structures that mean investors are always liable as individuals for the proportion of the company they control. That would slow investment (at least initially), but would mean the organisations that develop more accurately account for the costs they impose on others. That seems like a more efficient way for the market to operate, and wouldn't mean people are any more liable than they are now for external costs that they could not reasonably foresee.

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as we've gone off topic, but I think this is an interesting subject in its own right, I'm tempted to split this thread, from foghorn's post 18. Any thoughts? I will come back to this tomorrow morning, I need to sleep now

This post has been edited by MichaelKVegfruit: Nov 23 2008, 12:07 AM

Personally I don't think we have wandered that far from the OP, we're just looking at it from a different angle: supra-national corporations wield so much power that they do business in China regardless of ideology, in Saudi regardless of religion, in Belgium regardless of bureaucracy. Surely these are the new important countries or what comes after the nation state?

Canada is important because it has given the world great entertainers. *tongue planted firmly in cheek*

Alex Trebek Art Linkletter Thommy Chong Raymond Burr
Mike Myers Leslie Nielsen John Candy Donald Sutherland
Glenn Ford Howie Mandel Pamela Anderson Michael J. Fox
Tom Green Ryan Gosling Dan Akroyd Jim Carrey
Keanu Reeves Mary Pickford Shania Twain Neil Young
David Cronenberg Norman Jewison Peter Jennings Rush (Band)....and so on and so on


We deeply apologize for William Shatner and Céline Dion

Going to take more than your apologies for Céline: let's talk reparations MapleBoy.

I agree. I have no problem if you choose to split it off into another thread. The current economic crises and how it came to be seems worthy of it's own topic.

My main objective with my original post was to start discussion, and possibly create threads, about how individual countries have and might effect the rest of the world. I thought that focusing on individual countries, to the point of a very thorough discussion about them, I and others might better understand how complex and intertwined the world is.

Now that's funny!
As far as the last few posts, could we please move on as it's been hashed out elsewhere? And IMHO it's getting off topic.

MKVF mod note: Took hm3buzz's advice here, and moved a bunch of posts on the UK and US to a new, closed, thread

This post has been edited by MichaelKVegfruit: Nov 23 2008, 02:03 PM

I agree. In among some of the borderline off topic posts that I split from this thread, you and arrrgh discussed where this sort of comment could come from. My feeling is that if you read widely, you can get a pretty good idea about other countries. Locals may complain that you don't know the country as well as they do; that may be true, but you're also less likely to be biased. Reading local newspapers (many countries have English language local papers) and blogs (which are often very well-informed and well-written) is a good place to start.

It should also be a useful experiment in finding good quality, convincing, sources.

I've got a couple of ideas for topics, but (as I have to go down the shops in a minute, before they shut) I'll leave it to others to start some new threads.

This post has been edited by MichaelKVegfruit: Nov 23 2008, 02:20 PM