From: gary@colossus.cgd.ucar.edu (Gary Strand)
Newsgroups: misc.headlines,alt.activism,talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: WORLD GOVERNMENT
Date: 12 Aug 92 15:52:21 GMT
Article-I.D.: ncar.1992Aug12.155221.3392
Organization: Climate and Global Dynamics Division/NCAR, Boulder, CO


  [It would be a good idea to trim your articles so that bandwidth and cost
   can be saved. There was no reason to include my entire article, since you
   didn't respond to any specific part of it.]

ab> Alex Bunker
gs> Gary Strand

gs> Sorry, but your WG simply has too many problems to be practical. 

ab> The reasons I want a world government:
ab> 1) The level of injustice in the world without one I find intolerable. I
ab>    look at SU:Afganistan etc... and USA:Chile etc... as examples of big
ab>    rich nations picking on smaller nations and working for the interests 
ab>    of a subset of the human race at the expense of the whole. 

  You merely "change" the problem from national superpower -> small nation to
  world government -> all nations. Besides, who's to say that the US wouldn't
  dominate a world government anyway? Also, you ignore "minor" conflicts, like
  the ex-Yugoslavia civil war. One doesn't need to have major powers picking
  on smaller powers to have massive bloodshed. Also, what's the expense to
  the human race as a whole if the Serbs, Croats, etc. practice "ethnic clean-
  sing" on each other? Sounds like you don't have a means for dealing with
  localized problems.

ab>   Some nations through military strength have taken more than their fair
ab>   share of the worlds rescounces. What gives the right to the USA to use 
ab>   up 10 times as much unrenuewable rescource per capita than another 
ab>   country?

  From which countries does the US use bald military force to seize nonrenew-
  able resources? Also, does your "10 times" figure take into account that 
  the US GNP is the largest in the world? Lastly, how does one decide what a
  "fair share" is, when the distribution of these resources is most "unfair"?
  For example, is it "fair" that South Africa has such mineral wealth? That
  a country like Saudi Arabia has so much oil?

ab>   They only get away with it because they have a big powerful army that
ab>   stomps on any government that rises in the third world that tries to 
ab>   stop being a slave state and actually work for the interest of its own
ab>   people instead of the multinational corporations (like 50's honduras,
ab>   Allende Chile and Sandanista Nicaragua.)

  Come on! How much trade does the US do/did with the above three nations? I
  would bet a tiny (tiny!) fraction of what the US does with Canada, alone!
  The vast bulk of American trade is with Canada, Mexico, Japan, Western Eur-
  ope and Australia. What US Army keeps those nations "in line"? You sound
  like you've read too much about Lenin's theories on capitalism and imper-
  ialism. Also, it's hardly the fact that the US engages in nastiness with
  regards to trade with other countries. Europe and Japan are no strangers
  to trade wars.

ab> 2) There are many issues facing the world that we need to act on on a 
ab>    global level.

  Agreed. That does not mean that we need a global government, though.

ab>    While garbage collection is suitable to be taken care of by a local
ab>    govenrment and health care is suitable to be taken care of by a 
ab>    national government there are issues of a global scale that are not 
ab>    dealt with properly because we are missing the level of government
ab>    that can best deal with this.

  "Government" and "can best deal with <X>" are two concepts that do not fit
  together in any reasonable fashion.

ab>    These issues are population control,

  Are you prepared to have your government force involuntary sterilizations 
  and involuntary abortions (and perhaps more) on individuals? In other words,
  is effective population control possible under a free system, or does it
  require a totalitarian system, a la China?

ab>    environmental degredation, 

  Again, governments have shown themselves to be terrible at preserving or
  fixing the environment. Look at Eastern Europe and the XUSSR for examples.

ab>    peace and security,

  Peace and security between nations, perhaps (by the threat of more force
  than they can bring to bear, remember!) but what about peace and security
  *from* the world government? If we cannot trust nations to refrain from
  warring with each other, how can we trust a world government to refrain from
  making war on us?

ab>    Labor legislation (to ensure an even global economic playing field)

  Sorry, but the global economic "playing field" cannot be levelled. As I
  tried to point out to "Frank", a ski instructor just isn't going to be paid
  very much in Guam. Differences in geography, population distribution, re-
  sources, and so on, make it impossible to construct an economic system that
  overrides these differences. Just can't be done.

ab> I am not asking for an allpowerful monolith to dictate everything but a
ab> legislature to take care of these issue which would not be taken care of
ab> otherwise is all I am calling for.

  A legislature backed up by an all-powerful police/army, right? Otherwise,
  a law that's unenforced or unenforcable isn't a law. You cannot get away
  from using force or the threat of force. That's how governments operate.

ab> And no 5 billion people can not agree on anything but neither can 250
ab> million but the USA seems to function pretty well as a country.

  Partly because if things get really bad, one can move to another state, or
  even another country. No such options are available under a world govern-
  ment, unless the moon happens to be colonized by then. Also, you've got to
  remember that the bulk of Americans have a core set of common beliefs. For
  example, killing a person because of his ethnic heritage is frowned upon.
  Such a belief does not exist in ex-Yugoslavia, unfortunately. What a world
  government needs is for the bulk of the world's peoples to accept a common
  set of beliefs, and I don't think that's possible. Like I said, you cannot
  use force to get people to agree to these beliefs, they have to arrive at
  them on their own.

ab> This world government would be a multi party legislature. I think the best
ab> model is the European parliament.  In the European parliament legislatures
ab> were elected representing political parties in their own countries but the
ab> soon saw people with similar views from other countries and the banded
ab> together and soon all the country lines had dissolved and instead european
ab> political parties sat in parliament.

  Given all the problems that Europe is having in unifying itself, I can see
  that similar problems, only of much larger magnitude, would accompany a
  world government's legislature. And, it's hardly the case that Europeans
  don't have any problems with EEC bureaucrats running their lives. The Danes,
  British, and others are not entirely happy with the way things are going,
  and the EEC has the advantage that all its member countries are democracies.
  No such advantage will exist for a world government.

ab> The same would happen on a global scale. Instead of Chinese and Indians
ab> banding together to boss the rest of the world Chinese, Indian, Japanese,
ab> German,UK Social democrats would by competing aganint Chinese, Japanese,
ab> German, UK etc.. Conservatives.

  Sorry, there are no Chinese "social democrats" of any consequence. Last I
  checked, China was still ruled by hard-line Communists. You're going to
  have to crack that egg first. Also, what happened to the US in your list
  of political players? The US is the third most-populous country in the 
  world, you know (the break-up of the USSR means that the US moved up to
  3rd, since the USSR no longer exists, and Russia has fewer people than the
  US.) As you've bemoaned before, there are no significant social democrats
  in the US. That's going to be another egg to crack.

ab> Actually in a world legislature these would probably be the main two
ab> parties given the norms of politics across the world. 

  Sorry, the norm of politics across the world isn't democracy. There is much
  more to the world than Western Europe, you know.

ab> A small liberal party would probably be aligned with the conservatives and
ab> a small green party with the social democrats but it would basically be an
ab> opposition/government blocks scenario and the opposition and government
ab> would span the globe.

  I simply don't understand how you plan to scale up 300 million Europeans
  to 5+ billion humans, when the majority of those humans don't live in demo-
  cratic societies. 

  Sorry, but your WG simply has too many problems to be practical. 


--
Gary Strand                      Opinions stated herein are mine alone and are
strandwg@ncar.ucar.edu            not representative of NCAR, UCAR, or the NSF
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