At Foreign Policy’s Passport blog, Joshua Keating writes: "In a too-good-to-check item, the Daily Mirror reports that rapper Snoop Dogg recently attempted to rent the entire nation of Liechtenstein for a music video".
Anyone prepared to do a bit of Googling will find the rent-Liechtenstein story isn’t new. Back in 2003 newspapers including the New York Times and The Times reported that the "tiny principality of Liechtenstein is putting itself up for rent in a bid to attract corporate conferences and bolster its tourism industry".
That year AAP reported that Xnet’s Karl Schwärzler and the nation of Liechtenstein had been awarded an Ig Nobel prize in Economics "for making it possible to rent the entire country for corporate conventions, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other gatherings."
The New York Post didn’t think the Snoop Dogg story was too good to check and gave the ambassador a call. "There is no ‘For Rent’ sign on our country," ambassador Claudia Fritsche told The Post. "No part of any government agency is involved in this."
Xnet’s online ‘For Rent’ sign for Liechtenstein appears on their Rent a Village web site. According to the Mirror, Schwärzler was surprised by Snoop Dogg’s request: "Local property lease agent Karl Schwaerzler said: ‘We’ve had requests for palaces and villages but never one to hire the whole country before.’"
“There is no ‘For Rent’ sign on our country,” ambassador Claudia Fritsche told The Post.
Hey, I’d be quite happy to buy it.
If you bought a country would you be obliged to keep its system of governance, or could you just run it like a company?
TimT: you would keep the system of governance, but that in no way stops you running it as a company. See, eg, how the MPAA run the US.
If it really was the MPAA running the US, there’s no way Obama would be in power.
Only whacky African Americans get movie time.