The VOC (Dutch East India Company) and EIC (East India Company) were joint stock companies that took control of large parts of the Indian subcontinent in the seventeenth century.
Have any other countries been run in order to profit shareholders?
So the government is not answerable to population (even though it can be arranged that all citizens are shareholders). It's answerable to shareholders like corporations.
The shares can be bought and sold and earn dividend.
People get shares/citizenship based on purchase or contribution to economy and not based on being born at the right place with the right parents.
So a socialist guy having 40 children will not have 40 socialist children voting for socialism. The guy will just be paid to get out or forced to get out.
Basically like publicly traded company.
Any samples?
Doesn't have to be countries, any autonomous regions would do. I would say a cruiser ship would count but people don't stay and raise families there?
According to this the government system is meitochocracy
Update: After seeing comments, some question why would a region want to voluntarily be governed by a corporation.
While, it's not part of the question, hence, VOC, and EIC, and even free republic of Congo would work. However, there are reasonable reasons why the people in a region may benefit and consent to the idea of the corporations having some or all voting power for them.
- An area has almost no population or have very few small population. Here, a corporation persuade the small poor population to join.
- Investments. A corporation agree to invest if it can vote. Good for failing democracy.
- Citizens are shareholders. So it's still democracy in a sense. The investors have 5% of the share while 95% of voting power is still in the hand of the adult population.
- Efficiency. Much more difficult to corrupt money if all voters/shareholders want the exact same thing, namely, return on investments.
Here, voluntarily means reasonably voluntarily. Namely more than 50% of citizens agree, or their king agree, etc. I do not think any system can be 100% voluntary.
The basic idea is that the shares/citizenship is not automatically granted to children of citizens but must be bought. That prevents people with large number of children from moving the policy toward their kind. However, if a person have a large number of children, and they are rich enough to buy citizenship for each of his children, then there is no problem.
So it can be democracy with more accountability for citizens to be economically contribute.
People get shares/citizenship based on purchase or contribution to economy and not based on being born at the right place with the right parents.
This is actually how all cities works in China until last month. An individual is eligible to a city's citizenship (a collection of civil rights including social benefits, privilege to register a car and drive it within city limit, access to public schools for his/her child) only after he/she has an eligible job and bought a home in said city, or born in the city by parent(s) with citizenship.