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spoon said:
I don't know? What do we do now if the Dread Governor of Arkansas decides to do something evil?
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There's a reason I used "government" rather than "ruler", "leader", "president" et cetera. The US president can be removed without assasination precisely because he is a portion of the government, rather than the government itself. Sure, he is capable of doing a lot of evil stuff - nuking half the planet, for instance - without consent of the rest of the government; even if he had the full support of the entire US government, the average joe could still in practice run away from laws that were truely evil (such as mandatory lobotomies for everyone (except those closely related to a government official) with an IQ over 90) as the US does not hold sway over the whole planet.
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spoon said:
A world government can still have checks and balances.
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Sure; of course, checks and balances occasionally break down. Take, for example (a fairly extereme one), Hitler's rise to power. Post WWI Germany was handed a constitution as part of the WWI cleanup (I'm simplifying a lot here). They got an elected body with specific, limited powers, modeled after the British and US system. Their constitution gaurunteed certain rights, which could only be supressed in an emergency by at least a two-thirds majority vote of the elected body with at least two-thirds of that body present. The body was a party-election setup, similar to the British system; that is, the party with X% of the popular vote got X% of the seats.
Then Hitler came along. He was popular; he managed to get something like 45% of the popular vote for his party. Then, one day, it came about that all of his people were present, and enough of the other representatives were gone that there were just barely enough there to qualify for an emergency rights supression vote. Interestingly enough, two-thirds of two-thirds is four-ninths; which is 44%. The vote went along party lines and Hitler was handed the full reins of Germany, with full permission to do whatever he liked.
For a smaller example, take Washington State's (now named, wasn't so named at the time) SafeCo Field. Bills for funding it went to the voting public two or three times. Every time, it was turned down. Currently, you can buy a ticket and go see a game at SafeCo field, and know that the majority of the construction was funded by taxpayers, and the majority of the profits from the building go to private enterprise.
Tell me, do you really think that you (or anyone else) can come up with a worldwide system cohesive and strong enough to be safely called a world government that will (A) be long-term stable, (B) be "good" for virtually everyone (ignoring for the moment that virtually everyone has a different specific definition of "good"....), and (C) have checks and balances of such near-perfection that a particularly extraordinary person or group will never be able to come along and turn this ideal government around so that it now only cares about that particular person or group?