^{Democracy & Technology Blog} Private Company Could Pay Off 8 EU Nation’s Debts

John Cook, of Seattle-based GeekWire, reports that Apple has enough cash reserves to pay off eight EU countries’ debts–if it wanted to, which, of course, it doesn’t.
This story, based on an infographic from MBA Online the day before, puts Apple’s big quarter in prospective. GeekWire characterizes their revenue as “Three Yahoos, two Googles and a Microsoft”. It’s also interesting, and worth noting, that 2/3 of it is stored overseas.
Here we have a company that makes trinkets, bought voluntarily by free people, produced willingly by free people. Yet even after giving billions of dollars to the governments they labor under, they still make more money than even the most irresponsible governments can lose. Consider: Governments take money from people by threat of force, they have more resources than a corporation can dream of, they can quite literally eliminate their competition, and by-in-large, they’re above the law. Yet they still can’t take enough to rival what this one corporation can get people to freely hand over. There are of course many mitigating factors on both sides, but the numbers still stun. This company, with its relatively minimal staff, produces more in a year than the GDPs of 2/3 the world’s countries. …but big government is clearly the answer .