The talk that caught our ear as the foreign dignitaries flooded into the Manhattan this week for the U.N. General Assembly is the question of whether the United Nations should be put up for sale. The talk wasn’t about the United Nations campus at Turtle Bay, but about the world body itself. We wouldn’t want to make too much of the point. What we heard was just the most casual, informal conversation about how neat it would be. But it’s the talk we hear, nonetheless.

It starts with a general feeling around town that the world body that was created in San Francisco in the wake of World War II has been a signal failure. And that the occasional gathering, where envoys of all the various countries can get together and rub shoulders with businessmen and women, intellectuals, writers, journalists, and investors — while useful in a certain way and, in any event, fun — this sort of thing can be accomplished by private institutions like the one coinciding with the U.N. here in the city, the Clinton Global Initiative.

The CGI isn’t the only private institution that competes with the United Nations. There is the Davos Forum, among others. But this week there’s a feeling around town that the Clinton conference has a livelier and more imaginative agenda than the dirge at the United Nations headquarters on the East River. It was at the Clinton Initiative at which today the head of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad, sat down President Peres and Mr. Clinton and the Prince Al-Khalifa  of Bahrain and exchanged views on the economic possibilities in the aftermath of an Israeli-Arab peace treaty. Conversations have either taken place at the GCI, or will take place this week, on women, reforesting and micro-finance.

None of this is our cup of tea. None of it has the force of law. None of it amounts to a hill of beans compared to what, say, the typical United States Army platoon is doing for world peace in, say, Afghanistan. But the beauty of the Clinton Initiative is that  the taxpayers don’t get the bill for it. People can go, or not go, they can take their ideas back to their governments, or not. But the rest of us don’t have to pay for it.

Right off the beam that gives the Clinton initiative more credibility than the Soviet style confab that takes place at the taxpayers’ expense at the United Nations compound. And people are noticing. The Daily Beast this week issued a terrific piece by Dayo Olopade, who noted that “the former president’s Global Initiative — rife with deal making power players — could one day eclipse” the U.N. She characterized the GCI as a “competing summit” that brings together “thought-leaders from across the globe to tackle many of the same problems that are on the table at Turtle Bay.”

The Clinton Initiative has the added advantage that none of it has the force of treaty law. It’s just talk and pledges of action. So the question starting to eddy around town is whether, if the Clinton Initiative can do all this, what does one need the United Nations for? The peace-keeping forces haven’t brought peace (though there are something like 120,000 persons in the U.N.’s “army”). The World Health Organization could be set up separately.

It happens that we’re in an age when private companies are running many of our jails and our hospitals and our schools. Why in the world couldn’t they run the a global gab-fest? The United Nations headquarters buildings, once renovated, could be sold off for commercial uses. Or put out to the highest bidder among the Clinton Global Initiative and Davos Forum type of organizations. Eventually, the General Assembly would become a husk. It could be phased out as an inspiring experiment that led to a better, more modern way of holding the global conversation.