In a Sept. 29 opinion piece in The Business and Financial Times, Professor Katharina Pistor provides some context about the transactional governance of the Trump administration.
Pistor is a faculty co-director of Columbia’s Center for Political Economy and the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law. She is a leading scholar and writer on corporate governance, money and finance, property rights, and comparative law and legal institutions.
Pistor’s opinion piece takes to task the president’s announcement that the cost of applying for a U.S. visa will be $100,000. For citizenship, he announced the cost of fast-tracking an application will be $1 million.
“If history is any guide, running the state as if it were the “ultimate corporation,” as Elon Musk put it while he still enjoyed Trump’s favor, is not a good idea. During the age of colonialism, corporations were empowered to govern colonized people, as in the infamous cases of Britain’s East India Company, which conquered and ruled much of India, and Belgian King Leopold II’s Compagnie du Congo Belge.”
