Country M&A

While touring around Northern Ireland last week, a ridiculous idea occurred to me that I'd like to publish here: we should buy Mexico.

This came about during a tour of Derry. If you're not familiar with the history of Northern Ireland (or it's present day status), it's worth learning about. Present day status is that Northern Ireland is a constituent country of the UK. My Irish friend Rick O'Pedia gives a more substantive history here, but the short story is that at one point Britain drew a line in the Republic of Ireland and claimed the top as their own, kind of. And that line wasn't expected to include the city of Derry (Free Derry as it's still referred to by many Irish/Republicans, Londonderry as it's referred to by Britain and I guess 'officially', and Derry as it's referred to by tourists who don't want to rub anyone the wrong way).

Anyhow, when the line got drawn Derry was included in the UK portion.

So that got me thinking about how random the country divisions are. From colonialism to present day Iraq, it's just a bunch of people drawing lines for their own reasons. Made me wonder why we don't think about redrawing them more often outside of civil war and the like.

So maybe we buy Mexico and do the whole deal like corporate M&A (Mergers & Acquisitions). We pay a premium of 15 or 20% on GDP to the shareholders (all Mexicans), and give stock options and board positions to the Mexican government (where stock options = futures of some sort and board positions = seats on local and national government).

Then we put together some sort of integration plan for labour and state divisions/standardization, language and currency.

With the reorganization we get the benefits of a shorter border to protect. Our current border is 3,141km. That's a big and expensive wall. Our new border would be with Guatemala and Belize: 871km's with Guate and 251km with Belize.

Combined we'd have the strengths of a developed economy and the labor of an emerging market.

We make English and Spanish the national languages and start teaching everyone both instead of insisting that somehow speaking two languages is a bad thing.

...that's about as far I got. Lots of holes including the obvious fact that Mexicans are proud to be Mexican and also the fact that by combining countries you combine cultures and ultimately lose traditions and all of that, and it's probably not worth thinking anymore about. But whatever. Blogs are perfect for this kind of Sunday afternoon rambling.

USA!M!
(actually we wouldn't even need to change the name)