wevets:
The painfully obvious errors in squeels post were:
A. One world government is not required to overturn Chinese Communism. The Soviet Union did not require one. No government that has fallen in the history of the world has required one.
B. As you pointed out, a one world government would not necessarily be the ideal one (and in practice there are always problems). But even if it was ideal, that does not guarantee a republic or democracy. We might yet design a better system of government–to suggest democracy MUST be the ideal seems a little near-sighted (even if it’s the best we have now). Who knows where we’ll be in 50, 100, or 1000 years?
A. As far as this goes, I agree with you. A democratic world government would eliminate Chinese communism, but is not necessary to do so. I thought you were calling squeels naive for saying that a world government could be a republic with freely elected representatives. It’s apparent from your response that you were not.
B. I’ve excluded forms of government that do not yet exist from my consideration. The reason for that is that I don’t know what those forms of government are.
Derleth: Yes, a person representing many others holds a great deal of responsibility, which makes their job difficult. However, just because something is difficult doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be tried. There is a very low fault tolerance if you’re a brain surgeon, or issue earthquake warnings, or run a nuclear power plant, or are the commander of a nuclear submarine carrying almost 300 nuclear warheads; yet people still do these things. In addition, the burden on representatives can be relieved by including direct democracy in some (probably not all) aspects of government. I very much like the idea of the people voting directly on many issues, for example in the propositions found on many state ballots.
As I pointed out in my first post, it is going to a long time–perhaps a hundred years or more–before any serious effort is made to create a one-world government. In the meantime we are free to envision various arrangements–contingent on certain speculative conditions–and ask each other if we would support such an arrangement. There’s no way I would support a one-world government with the current Coummunist dictatorship of China as a full member. But what if, a couple of generations from now, we find ourselves in a world in which there aren’t any authoritarian regimes? Another idea, which I just sort of hinted at, would be for the initial one-world overnment to be formed from only the democratic societies and would then proceed to sanction any remaining dictatorships. A wholesale war of liberation would be fairly radical, and, you might say, Napoleonic.
At this stage in the debate it is unneccessary to presume that any eventual OWG can only be something bad. Just say, “If it’s not perfect, I won’t support it. I’ll wait until the conditions to make it nearly perfect are present”. Of course the world isn’t ready for an OWG, and any premature effort will inevitably provoke overwhelming opposition and fail. Refer to my earlier posts envisioning a system of regional federations. That would be complex and daunting enough, with no OWG in sight.