A friend of mine (who is of a sort of mountain man isolationist libertarian type) keeps going on and on about how (any day now) there will be an American Union, sort of an EU of the America’s with a standard currency, open borders and all that jazz. This is of course a prelude to the feared One World Government that this is all leading up to.
My question though is, what indications are there that something like this is even in the works? I know it’s a nutball theory (and have told him so repeatedly), but it seems to be a wide spread nutball theory, at least in some libertarian circles I know of. Where does it come from? What is it based on? I assume it’s mostly bullshit, as most of these CT’s are, but I don’t really know what, if anything, they are basing this dire prediction on.
I am a libertarian and technically a registered member of the Libertarian party but the political party itself goes off the rails on this stuff. Off course it isn’t true and won’t ever be. Why would the U.S. and Canada ever want to include Mexico in this? Things are bad enough as it is with illegal immigration. Radical libertarians actually want U.S. borders open to the entire world. It is just garden variety nut job rhetoric.
The NAFTA and its more ambitious successor, the envisaged FTAA take this direction. The European Union as it exits now is far more than a free trade area - it’s also a tariffs union (a free trade area is a group of states which do not levy tariffs on trade among them; a tariffs union goes beyond that by setting up a common tariff for imports from outside the union), and it has the ambitious objective of setting up a common market - an area which, for economic purposes, functions as a single market just the way one nation would. The EU is actually pretty close to a perfect common market.
But you should keep in mind that it took a long way for the EU to get that far. It all started in 1952 with an organization aimed at coordinating the production of coal and steel in six European countries, and a series of reforms and expansions (interrupted by occasional setbacks, such as right now after the failure of the Lisbon reform treaty) brought the European Union to the point where it is now. There was no master plan behind this, it was a process of evolution rather than revolution.