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Mass_Driver comments on The Irrationality Game - Less Wrong
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The proposition strikes me as either circular or wrong, depending on your definitions of "peaceful" and "prosperous."
If by "peaceful" you mean "devoid of violence," and by "violence" you essentially mean "transfers of wealth that are contrary to just laws," and by "just laws" you mean "laws that honor private property rights above all else," then you should not be surprised if joint stock corporations are the most peaceful entities the world has seen so far, because joint stock corporations are dependent on private property rights for their creation and legitimacy.
If by "prosperous" you mean "full of the kind of wealth that can be reported on an objective balance sheet," and if by "objective balance sheet" you mean "an accounting that will satisfy a plurality of diverse, decentralized and marginally involved investors," then you should likewise not be surprised if joint stock corporations increase prosperity, because joint stock corporations are designed so as to maximize just this sort of prosperity.
Unfortunately, they do it by offloading negative externalities in the form of pollution, alienation, lower wages, censored speech, and cyclical instability of investments onto individual people.
When your 'goals' are the lowest common denominator of materialistic consumption, joint stock corporations might be unbeatable. If your goals include providing a social safety net, education, immunizations, a free marketplace of ideas, biodiversity, and clean air, you might want to consider using a liberal democracy.
Using the most charitable definitions I can think of for your proposition, my estimate for the probability that a joint-stock system would best achieve a fair and honest mix of humanity's crasser and nobler goals is somewhere around 15%, and so I'm upvoting you for overconfidence.
Coming from the angle of competition in governance, I think you might be mixing up a lot of stuff. A joint stock corporation which is sovereign is trying to compete in the wider world for customers , i.e. willing taxpayers.
If the people desire the values you have mentioned then the joint-stock government will try to provide those cost effectively.
Clean Air and Immunizations will almost certainly be on the agenda of a city government
Biodiversity will be important to a government which includes forests in its assets and wants to sustainably maintain the same.
A free marketplace of ideas, free education and social safety nets would purely be determined by the market for people. Is it an important value enough that people would not come to your country and would go to another? if it is, then the joint stock government would try to provide the same. If not, then they wouldn't.
All of this makes sense in principle.
(I'm assuming you're not thinking that any of it would actually work in practice with either humans or ideal rational agents, right?)
Good response, but I have to agree with wedrifid here: you can't compete for "willing taxpayers" at all if you're dealing with hard public goods, and elsewhere competition is dulled by (a) the irrational political loyalties of citizens, (b) the legitimate emotional and economic costs of immigration, (c) the varying ability of different kinds of citizens to move, and (d) protectionist controls on the movement of labor in whatever non-libertopian governments remain, which might provide them with an unfair advantage in real life, the theoretical axioms of competitive advantage theory be damned.
I'd be all for introducing some features of the joint stock corporation into some forms of government, but that doesn't sound very much like what you were proposing would lead to peace and prosperity -- you said the jsc was better than other forms, not a good thing to have a nice dose of.