Governments are at their core, service providers. Monopolies tend not to provide good services. And when the world government abuses you, you will have nowhere else to go.
Mars? ;-)
The need for world government
11–20 of 133 posts
Re: The need for world government
#12No, we humans are different. We don’t need one single entity telling all of us what to do. World government will just exarcebate civil wars.
Re: The need for world government
#13Based on how the EU and UN worked out a world government sounds like a disaster.
Neither of those are governments, the UN is a forum for discussion and is very much needed if not always enormously successful.
The EU isn’t (obviously) global, but has actually been pretty successful. I actually think it’s a pretty good model, but the emphasis would have to be more on global issues such as climate change than trade.
Re: The need for world government
#14Governments are at their core, service providers. Monopolies tend not to provide good services. And when the world government abuses you, you will have nowhere else to go.
So it sounds like we need multiple world governments operating over the same area rather than having a bunch of monopolies around the globe.
Re: The need for world government
#15"It seems obvious to me that planetary problems demand planetary government."
That does not seem obvious to me at all. And I can't imagine a common set of governing principles acceptable to Iceland, China, Russia and the Taliban.
For example, looking at what is currently rocking the U.S., what would be the global policy on abortion?
Re: The need for world government
#16People just aren’t that smart.
Yes. We would like to have a group of super smart people who can tell us what to do and we can just do that and everything will work out great. Unfortunately, such people don’t exist.
Sorry, you’ve got to figure it out for yourself.
Re: The need for world government
#17"It seems obvious to me that planetary problems demand planetary government." That does not seem obvious to me at all. And I can't imagine a common set of governing principles acceptable to Iceland, China, Russia and the Taliban. For example, looking at what is currently rocking the U.S., what would be the global policy on abortion?
Abortion should be a human right. All countries that don’t respect that should pay huge fines. Thanks for giving that example.
Re: The need for world government
#18No thanks. If you thought the grift and corruption within national governments was bad, this would put it on steroids. People claim to like democracy, but when they aren’t getting their way they want to rig the system or add yet another layer to it in hopes of “fixing it”. No. What we need is better people. Better technology. Better practical education. Etc. If men were angels no government would be necessary.
Re: The need for world government
#19I used to think that global government would be a good idea but I now realize that this was incredibly naive.
Now that I understand human nature better and how the worst aspects of human nature tend to concentrate around the centers of power, I cannot think of anything more dangerous than a world government.
I actually advocate for the opposite; break up existing governments and make them smaller; no government should govern over more than 5 million people.
Having lived in some small sovereign nations (with 500K to 1 million people) and also some big nations with over 70 million people, my feeling about big countries is that people are essentially treated like livestock.
People get used to it, but coming from a small nation, it feels very wrong. People living under such powerful governments tend to adopt an overly compliant mentality and to some extent lose some of their humanity; it gets replaced by a kind of fear and apathy.
Re: The need for world government
#20Based on how the EU and UN worked out a world government sounds like a disaster.
What do you mean? Nothing is perfect but the EU has been a net positive for its member states. It is approved of by a majority of its citizens across all countries. The EU created one of the most prosperous (for the common person), free and tolerant societies on earth.
You can make all the snarky remarks you want, but if you were reincarnating right now as some random human and you learned that you reincarnated as a citizen of the EU, you would probably sigh in relief.
In my experience, the strongest criticisms of the EU come from outsiders who would prefer to impose their views and preferences on how Europeans should live, and on the role that Europe should play in the world stage -- a more subservient one.