Corporations: Delivering value to nation state clients for 300 years

Reading a book on the history of the corporation (it's good). So it turns out that the East India Company was given a monopoly on tea to America, allowing them to sustain high prices, and that this happened shortly before... you guessed it, the Boston Tea Party. 300 years later, the Americans, having completely failed to learn from their own history, put the company Blackwater in charge of much of the security in Iraq, under rules that let them shoot pretty much whoever they want without consequence.

Sometimes you don't have to make up analogies, the world just hands them to you.