Your Views on a world Government

[Grandpa Kim]

What are your views on a Unified World Government?

Good idea but we are not ready for it. At one time I thought we were moving in that direction then along came the breakup of the soviet bloc and now we have far more nations now then 30 years ago. Not to mention separtists all over the world: French Canadians and Basques come to mind.

What would be required to create it?

A willingness to legislate only the essentials... and that is where we are unready.

What would be the benefits?

These have been pointed out by others and are both obvious and vague.

What are the cons?

To many Groups/individuals trying to get there pet peeve passed into law even though 99% of the world does not want it. IE: mandatory state religion, polygamy illegal.

Which nations do you think should be dominant in it's creation?

Are you kidding me?? If any group of nations dominates the creation, I will have nothing to do with it!! Any group will have its own agenda. It will benefit themselves only, not me, not even the citizens of their own countries!

[dogscoff]

Vote anarchy! (It's better than no government at all!)

Seriously, as long as there is power, there will be someone willing to abuse that power. IMHO power needs to be held locally, where it can be applied with an understanding of the local situation, and where corrupt/ misguided leaders can only inflict a limited amount of damage.

I think with the internet, and with whatever comes after the internet (IE very portable, highly (and automatically) configurable, permanently connected and seamless devices/ applications that are almost as much a part of a person as their arms or legs or teeth) we can expect power to become more and more distributed, and that will be a good thing.

The kind of thing we are seeing now with the music industry will eventually happen to politics: In other words, politics (or at least, politicians) will cease to become relevant. The music industry is currently losing a grip on the market because the people it held in its hands- namely artists and music lovers- have found the technology to slip between the industry's fingers and are in the process of making the massive, lumbering, centralised structure of the industry utterly irrelevant. Imagine a giant trying to catch grains of sand in a sand-storm. Government will go the same way. Through technology, people will gradually get the power to slip between the fingers of government and administer their own lives. This will mean a lot of law-breaking, probably a lot of totalitarian clamp-downs and riots and shootings as government desperately tries to cling on to the power it once had (think RIAA suing individual file-sharers and bullying governments into passing IP laws for its benefit) but in the end there's nothing they can do.

Obviously all this is very abstract, and it makes it no easier to imagine just how you could run an army or a health service or benefits system or taxation in such a distributed fashion, but I believe people will find ways, and that will be the future. Hell, it worked for the Borg. It won't be world government, it will be self-government on a global scale, and it will be a damn sight better than what we have now. Sadly, it probably won't happen in our lifetimes.

0.02

[Starhawk]

Sorry Dog that sounds terrifying to me, I mean I know some folks that if they were self governing would end up blowing up the world (if only an accident while the were stoned) People have proven we can't govern ourselves (individually) for millenia, we need something to unify us and in some ways some ways we need people to look up to for guidance and leadership, it is in our very nature to form tribes, states, nations and governments because we know we can't rule ourselves withotu guidance and leadership.


I think a good form of government would be that instead of the rich and powerful being politicos we switch over to a mentallity of letting true leaders and truely wise people become our leaders no matter whether they are loaded or poor.

[Makinus]

Starhawk said:
I think a good form of government would be that instead of the rich and powerful being politicos we switch over to a mentallity of letting true leaders and truely wise people become our leaders no matter whether they are loaded or poor.

And how you would identify true leaders and wise people? I know a lot of very charismatic people that after the election wrecked entire countries... just to point an example, once we elected in Brazil a mr. Fernando Collor de Mello as president, that later was involved in a scandal of millions of dollars apropriated from government funds, and even implicated in extorsion schemes.... the brazilians went to the streets to demand his impeachment and he resigned, but during the elections he was the most popular candidate, very charismatic and so on...

[deccan]

Makinus said:
And how you would identify true leaders and wise people?

Exactly. Lord Acton's oft-quoted line that "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." should always be kept in mind. Any system of government that relies solely on the continued benevolence of despots as the sole check on government is always suspect.

[deccan]

It occurs to me that I should post this link.

A Short Guide to Comparative Government

It's funny, not too serious.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Funny.