[rahen]

> I've always thought that every authoritarian regime is simply a company whose business is to manage and extract value from the country that they own, like any other productive asset.

Yes, they are predatory organizations by nature - in fact a closer operational model would be mafias. This was developed further by Murray Rothbard in his book "Anatomy of the State": https://cdn.mises.org/anatomy-of-the-state.pdf

[tovej]

Murray Rothbard is a radical anarcho-capitalist of the Austrian school, he doesn't believe that empirical data can falsify a mathematical model of human behavior. In other words, if I can editorialize a little --- he's a nut.