AHC/WI: Government actually run like a business

BigBlueBox

Banned
The challenge is to have a sovereign state somewhere in the world reject the standard parliamentary or presidential forms of government and decide to run its government like a corporation. And when I say “like a corporation”, I mean that the government is run by a Board of Directors who hires the chief executive and other top officials, and can fire them at will. How this board of directors is chosen is up to you, but the Board of directors should be no larger than 30, and the hired officials should not be members of the board and should at least be theoretically nonpartisan technocrats - otherwise this would just be a standard parliamentary system.

This might sound odd, but this form of government already exists at the city-level in America. It’s called the council-manager system. The challenge is to get it implemented at the national level.
 
I don’t mean to be snippy, I’m a Masters in Public Admin student myself, so I agree that this is an efficient local system
 
We could get some random aspiring African or Latin American oligarchs look to the British East India Company or the VOC for inspiration.

Countries that rely too much on harvesting/exploiting one resource would be vulnerable to this, like the Banana Republics in the early 1900s, Leopold's Congo, and perhaps, Venezuela.
 
The trouble begins when they start to hire & fire their citizens....
Wouldn’t citizens be more like shareholders? They would need to be bought out instead of fired.

This topic is very interesting to me. Ever since I’ve watched the original Robocop movie, in which the OCP corporation takes over Detroit, I’ve always wondered if a corporatocracy could be established on a national level and how well would it function.
 
Running a business and running a country are two different things. In business when you fire someone or downsize you don't have to deal with the long term consequences of those actions, with a country you do.
 
The purpose of business is profit for the top shareholders, including top management. Care of workers, consumers, environment are just means to that end not ends in and of themselves. These are things to be exploited and cost contained.

Workers get too uppity or expensive? Fire them or outsource. Consumers dissatisfied? Screw em as much as you can get away with, especially if an unregulated monopoly. Environment being ruined? Someone else's problem if it doesn't affect profits.

In order to run a country like a business, only the shareholders of that country-business get to profit. Everything else is a means to be exploited. So if you aren't a shareholder, you don't want to live in a country run like a business.

Closest example to a country run like a business is Congo Free State.
 
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This might sound odd, but this form of government already exists at the city-level in America. It’s called the council-manager system. The challenge is to get it implemented at the national level.

The council-manager system is nothing like running a govt like a business. All the councilman are still elected officials including the mayor. They make executive and policy decisions and are nothing like a board of directors in a corp whose only role is occasional oversight but otherwise gives the CEO full powers to make executive and policy decisions.

The city manager doesn't act like a CEO trying to maximize profit and can't make most executive type decisions and can't make policy decisions.

He is more like a nonpartisan head of all city departments that oversees the day to day city functions but has no true executive authority. He just oversees the city departments on a daily basis on the mayor and council's behalf.
 
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Closest example to a country run like a business is Congo Free State

I mean, replace "CEO" with "King", "Board of Directors" with "Sejm", and "Shareholders" with "Nobility" and you basically end up with the PLC here...

But yeah, more generally, this combination of self interested barely accountable government and varying grades of power leads to essentially feudalism without the decorations.
 

xsampa

Banned
How would its attitudes towards national identity be? If it's the 20th century, I could see it enforce English as the "language of business", but it might adopt whatever local tongue needed if it ruled over a majority-nonAnglophone population.
 
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