Countries For Sale: A Capital Solution for Stubborn Problems

The Economist has a fanciful, tongue-in-cheek editorial on the possibility of solving some of the world's troubling dilemmas by purchasing bits of other countries. Spurned on by the recent proposal by the Maldivian president to buy a new homeland for his drowning nation - rising sea levels threaten the tiny island nation with extinction - the Economist suggests using this approach elsewhere:

The Israelis, for instance, could put an end to a hundred years of futile hostilities by buying somewhere for the Palestinians. If they clubbed together, they could get somewhere really nice—Florida, maybe. China could stop making aggressive gestures towards Taiwan and buy Malaysia instead. It’s already run by
Chinese, so they’d hardly notice the difference.

When I was a teenager, I naively toyed with the idea of a land-swap to address some sticky international issues (the citizens of N. Ireland might actually enjoy the weather along the West Bank, after all), but the market solution seems a better approach.