11 ms·

The need for world government

30 points by galfarragem 4y ago

invig 4y ago
I’m sure there’s no chance of corruption becoming an issue within a single all powerful entity.
- i5heu 4y ago
  Not if this entity is publicly and totally surveilled with all its members.
  - thatjoeoverthr 4y ago
    If you have a plan that will solve corruption in this way, try it on some existing states.
  - kzrdude 4y ago
    I think you need accountability and regular rotation of leadership. There must be some reason that global sports organizations so often attract corruption. I'm thinking of UEFA, FIFA and many of the other less well known sports associations - FIDE for chess etc, and many more. They usually don't have a democratic governance structure and let interests of the involved people entrench themselves. I don't think total surveillance is enough.
usrn 4y ago
Based on how the EU and UN worked out a world government sounds like a disaster.
- cpach 4y ago
  IMHO, EU is a good example. However, it’s limited in both scope and area. Which is a good thing IMHO.
- mnd999 4y ago
  Neither of those are governments, the UN is a forum for discussion and is very much needed if not always enormously successful. The EU isn’t (obviously) global, but has actually been pretty successful. I actually think it’s a pretty good model, but the emphasis would have to be more on global issues such as climate change than trade.
- telmo 4y ago
  What do you mean? Nothing is perfect but the EU has been a net positive for its member states. It is approved of by a majority of its citizens across all countries. The EU created one of the most prosperous (for the common person), free and tolerant societies on earth. You can make all the snarky remarks you want, but if you were reincarnating right now as some random human and you learned that you reincarnated as a citizen of the EU, you would probably sigh in relief. In my experience, the strongest criticisms of the EU come from outsiders who would prefer to impose their views and preferences on how Europeans should live, and on the role that Europe should play in the world stage -- a more subservient one.
  - bilvar 4y ago
    Have you asked anyone not German or French what do they think about living in the EU? I’m sure it’s turned out great for Germany and their lap dog, but let’s ask the Spanish, the Italians and especially the Greek and have this conversation again.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      AFAICT, the Germans and the French are more annoyed at bailing out the south than the south is at being bailed out. AFAICT the Greeks trust the EU government a heck of a lot more than they trust their own. Ask the Poles and Ukrainians about what they think about EU membership. By some metrics Poland is the fastest growing economy in the world.
      - bilvar 4y ago
        "AFAICT, the Germans and the French are more annoyed at bailing out the south than the south is at being bailed out." The Germans and the French were more than happy betting on Italian and Greek bonds which were junk-level and provided great yields. But, when in Greece's case the chickens came home to roost and their risk was about to materialize they forced a bailout program on the Greek people instead of allowing them to default. Having a country in the Eurozone defaulting their debt would have devastating impact on the Euro too, so there was double-whammy of incentives for the EU technocrats to bailout Greece. After the Greek economy got devastated, mainly German companies entered the Greek market and obliterated the local competition, especially in the retailer industry with brands like Lidl coming in and undercutting the Greek businesses which had been around for decades. Moreover, they bought out a lot of those Greek businesses for a piece of bread and merged them with their own. So Greek people were essentially spending their bailout money buying products from the Germans. At the end of the day, Germany was moving money from one pocket to the other and also making interest on top of it. No EU technocrat bailed out Greece out of kindness. Now of course, the propaganda machine will lament every day to the average Joe about how the lazy Italians and Greeks are stealing their money. So the 'annoyance' is understandable. "AFAICT the Greeks trust the EU government a heck of a lot more than they trust their own." False. They distrust them equally and for different reasons. "Ask the Poles and Ukrainians about what they think about EU membership. By some metrics Poland is the fastest growing economy in the world." I don't know Polish people and I don't know what their sentiment towards the EU is. The Ukranians have no idea what it is to be a member of the EU, they can't know from the outside. If just the fact that a country wants to join the EU is an indicator of how great the EU is, then the other way round is also true (UK, Switzerland and Norway not wanting to join, or several countries having a 'leaving' sentiment brewing within).
Paul_S 4y ago
That's no different than saying I believe we need world peace. It's not a very interesting thing to say. If you have an idea how to bring this about then that would interesting to read - a probable process of creating a world government.
cpach 4y ago
It’s an interesting idea. I know that both Carl Bildt (Swedish politician) and Bard/Söderqvist (Swedish authors) have been thinking about this. I’m not convinced though. There are so many Trumps, Erdogans, Orbans etc in the world and too many people who enable them.
voldacar 4y ago
Governments are at their core, service providers. Monopolies tend not to provide good services. And when the world government abuses you, you will have nowhere else to go.
- cpach 4y ago
  Mars? ;-)
- enykeev 4y ago
  So it sounds like we need multiple world governments operating over the same area rather than having a bunch of monopolies around the globe.
  - ilammy 4y ago
    Which is exactly what we already have. There is what your local government says you should be doing, and there is what your friendly (or not so much) neighborhood superpowers say your government should be doing.
    - kzrdude 4y ago
      We also already have in most countries a hierarchy of governments - a state government, a central government, etc. In the EU we certainly have regional government, member state government and EU institutions. All of these are different shades of government and in some cases conflict with each other. In some areas EU has been a boon - a "safety valve" where the member state government is put into a competitive system where it has to align itself with external expectations from the EU institutions. I.e. breaking up their monopoly power in that sense. Some national governments want/wanted to completely control the sale of medicine, foods, alcohol etc and to some extent EU has broken up that control.
    - jokethrowaway 4y ago
      Incorrect, we should have multiple hospital providers and multiple protection services available in the same space. Moving country is not always easy
trbh 4y ago
Climate change etc. should be handled by international agreements. If there is no competition between countries, governments tend to turn their despotic energies on their own citizens. There would be nowhere for Snowden or Assange to go. If your social credit score is ruined, it is ruined worldwide. The military would be used to suppress the population. I'm very certain that a world government would turn into a Stalinist hell very quickly.
- ultim8k 4y ago
  As much as I want a single government without wars and nations, I believe that you are unfortunately right. A single entity is much easier to be corrupted and suppress humans. Perhaps there is still a way. I think EU is a good example. It has its problems but I can’t imagine Europe without it.
immigrantheart 4y ago
No, we humans are different. We don’t need one single entity telling all of us what to do. World government will just exarcebate civil wars.
inglor_cz 4y ago
"It seems obvious to me that planetary problems demand planetary government." That does not seem obvious to me at all. And I can't imagine a common set of governing principles acceptable to Iceland, China, Russia and the Taliban. For example, looking at what is currently rocking the U.S., what would be the global policy on abortion?
- jka 4y ago
  > what would be the global policy on abortion? The U.N. Human Rights Committee has a recent (2019) publication[1], "General comment no. 36, Article 6 (Right to Life)" that contains an entry that is relevant to this question. Page two, item eight under "General Remarks": "Although States parties may adopt measures designed to regulate voluntary termination of pregnancy, those measures must not result in violation of the right to life of a pregnant woman or girl, or her other rights under the Covenant. Thus, restrictions on the ability of women or girls to seek abortion must not, inter alia, jeopardize their lives, subject them to physical or mental pain or suffering that violates article 7 of the Covenant, discriminate against them or arbitrarily interfere with their privacy. States parties must provide safe, legal and effective access to abortion where the life and health of the pregnant woman or girl is at risk, or where carrying a pregnancy to term would cause the pregnant woman or girl substantial pain or suffering, most notably where the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest or where the pregnancy is not viable. In addition, States parties may not regulate pregnancy or abortion in all other cases in a manner that runs contrary to their duty to ensure that women and girls do not have to resort to unsafe abortions, and they should revise their abortion laws accordingly. For example, they should not take measures such as criminalizing pregnancy of unmarried women or applying criminal sanctions to women and girls who undergo abortion or to medical service providers who assist them in doing so, since taking such measures compels women and girls to resort to unsafe abortion. States parties should remove existing barriers to effective access by women and girls to safe and legal abortion, including barriers caused as a result of the exercise of conscientious objection by individual medical providers, and should not introduce new barriers. States parties should also effectively protect the lives of women and girls against the mental and physical health risks associated with unsafe abortions. In particular, they should ensure access for women and men, and especially girls and boys, to quality and evidence-based information and education on sexual and reproductive health and to a wide range of affordable contraceptive methods, and prevent the stigmatization of women and girls who seek abortion. States parties should ensure the availability of, and effective access to, quality prenatal and post-abortion health care for women and girls, in all circumstances and on a confidential basis." [1] - https://www.refworld.org/docid/5e5e75e04.html https://www.refworld.org/docid/5e5e75e04.html
imgabe 4y ago
People just aren’t that smart. Yes. We would like to have a group of super smart people who can tell us what to do and we can just do that and everything will work out great. Unfortunately, such people don’t exist. Sorry, you’ve got to figure it out for yourself.
- freemade 4y ago
  Yes exactly, and wait until you realize those random powerful people are simply petty rulers who have closets filled with skeletons and don't care about you or your community.
mberning 4y ago
No thanks. If you thought the grift and corruption within national governments was bad, this would put it on steroids. People claim to like democracy, but when they aren’t getting their way they want to rig the system or add yet another layer to it in hopes of “fixing it”. No. What we need is better people. Better technology. Better practical education. Etc. If men were angels no government would be necessary.
cryptica 4y ago
I used to think that global government would be a good idea but I now realize that this was incredibly naive. Now that I understand human nature better and how the worst aspects of human nature tend to concentrate around the centers of power, I cannot think of anything more dangerous than a world government. I actually advocate for the opposite; break up existing governments and make them smaller; no government should govern over more than 5 million people. Having lived in some small sovereign nations (with 500K to 1 million people) and also some big nations with over 70 million people, my feeling about big countries is that people are essentially treated like livestock. People get used to it, but coming from a small nation, it feels very wrong. People living under such powerful governments tend to adopt an overly compliant mentality and to some extent lose some of their humanity; it gets replaced by a kind of fear and apathy.
- gus_massa 4y ago
  There are 47 cities that have more than 5 million people in the official boundaries (71 if you count the surrounding area). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  Exactly, this is why I started my own government, the Republic of Ingleside, where I'm the sovereign. We enforce a strict adherence to the state religion, Ingleside Abbeyism, which is actually how the whole thing started - existing religions provided me with inadequate tax write-offs, and the whole thing sort of snowballed from there, but the end result has proven to be quite satisfying now that I'm responsible for creating the laws that I must abide by; the more local government, the better.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
newaccount2021 4y ago
oifjsidjf 4y ago
1) If you centralize everything into one government: what if that one government becomes corrupt? Then you cannot run to any other governments. 2) Cultural differences will require that different populations operate and behave differently, you will never be able to put the same constraints on different cultures.
- chii 4y ago
  > Cultural differences will require that different populations operate and behave differently so you have local/regional government, responsible for local and regional policies. But global policies would be controlled by a global gov't.
  - mpfundstein 4y ago
    sounds a lot like Russia
    - Garvey 4y ago
      Or the US with Federal and State law
      - kiliancs 4y ago
        Or pretty much everywhere, with a whole gradient of levels of autonomy.
- herodoturtle 4y ago
  Centralised government and democracy are not mutually exclusive.
  - thoms_a 4y ago
    Democracy has become a mantra. It means nothing. There are many corrupt and dysfunctional democracies throughout the world.
freedom2099 4y ago
World government is our only hope!
sgt101 4y ago
I myself believe in the need for a world government. I will make a great and kind emperor. It's high time that everyone gets onboard with this.
raydiatian 4y ago
I recently read Ray Dalio’s Principles of The Changing World Order. He essentially claimed that at the scale of world governments, man’s capacity to operate an intergovernmental social contract is non-existent. It is not without an effort to make it so, it’s just that unless there is a bigger fish defining the rules of the game are fair, we sort of brush up against Darwinian nature. Essentially, if a nation possesses some opportunity but doesn’t possess the means to defend it, it belongs to whichever nation is strong enough to come and take it. Also, Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0 book has a fascinating fictional story about a company that uses AI to drive a new world order, back towards the center. It is both exceptionally hand-wavey but also not entirely unbelievable. Not necessarily trying to make a point or anything, just thoughts that this article reminded me of.
snidane 4y ago
World government makes sense so that coverage of responsibility would be extended over all common areas such as air and oceans. With decentralised govt there is no owner of oceans, it's a common pasture, so nobody prevents certain countries from hunting down all the whales until extinction and poor countries making ocean a dumpster for plastics that rich green countries recycled their plastics to. However, world government doesn't make sense before more planets are settled, because no governent model is perfect yet and the best model we have so far is a competition between states as to which model should prevail. Eg., you are a monarchy and your next king is a moron. Too bad, having democracy would have made this only temporary. You are a democracy and your country's media run by oligarchs found a way to rule by influencing masses. Too bad, if you had a king, he would imprison the oligarchs. There will be cycles in model of government in foreseeable future, so it is premature to decide on the one government style yet, so it is dangerous to do one and only world govt yet. Wait for Musk to colonize Mars at least.
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  My government (in Europe) has been increasingly worse in the last 30 years (at least). That's just as bad as a monarchy if not worst. At least the monarchy takes drastic decisions (some good, some bad) but has all the power so they'll be held responsible. Kings still risk being executed or assassinated. Our governments keep saying they can't do anything because of the system and just keep pushing out laws that make life marginally worse for everyone over decades. Nobody even remembers politicians' name: they collectively risk way less than monarchs (who actually wield power, not expensive and useless stamp models, overpaid by the taxpayers, like the Queen of England)
vbezhenar 4y ago
I'm pretty sure we do have world government. May be not a single person, but something like a council of few most powerful persons. I bet they include Rothschild, Rockefeller, may be someone else. And most powerful governments are controlled by that council.
- thoms_a 4y ago
  More precisely, we have an aspirational world government led by the American Empire which is run by a few extremely wealthy and powerful elite families, including the ones you've alluded to. Of course, these powerful families own all the media companies and thus control how they are covered in the mainstream media, which explains their absence and subsequent emphasis on politically inconsequential billionaires like Musk. The American Empire is run via these families through a distributed influence network of private companies, NGOs, think tanks and PACs [1]. Although made up of many entities, they are funded by the same few individuals. Thus, this is a very difficult system to reform without immense capital expenditure. The countries which do not submit to this order are the designated public enemies (we have always been at war with Eastasia). Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea being the most prominent of these. Disclaimer: I am a deeply committed conspiracy theorist who also believes in the Earth being flat, so please take everything I say as the ramblings of a kook (especially any hardworking federal employees perusing HN)! 1. https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-brief-explanation-of-the-cathedral https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-brief-explanation-of-the...
aguacaterojo 4y ago
These things form when the will or the power to implement is there. I would think the possibility of such a unified cross cultural & properly effective institution would be down to power & strategic interests i.e. game theory. Humans will seek power when it's available and wield it to do things in their interest. Also a world government making decisions on "immigration" whose effects are distributed unevenly on its constituents. Look at Poland in the EU right now. https://www.bbc.com/news/59348337 https://www.bbc.com/news/59348337 "We could replace the war model with the policing model". How? Total fascism or weaker punitive measures? Also does the omission of one correlate strictly with the absence of the other? And over what time scale? Look up "Mediocristan" & "Extremistan" to get an understanding of how the urge to control from a top down level can blow up. "we could institute the basic human right of mobility on the planet" some ecosystems cannot support free mobility.
jokethrowaway 4y ago
The major flaw of any centralised entity is that power hungry and corrupt individuals will be attracted to the top and the honest people won't want to do anything with it. We already see it in our local governments. We even see it in larger corporations. It's even visible, with decreasing rarity based on the size of group, in a building administration group or in a group of friends who pool money to do something. This reasoning makes me think we should go to decentralisation and federation until the power being wielded is minuscole, ideally being limited only to your person and your private property. There can be several iterations, the ultimate being a free society where individuals are the only structure and transactions are an voluntary (eg. No governments at all, private everything)
HKH2 4y ago
Big countries such as the US, Russia and China are already difficult to manage due to their size. Won't that problem be exacerbated if you make one big country? Also, isn't it better to have split testing?
rvieira 4y ago
Personally, I think that a "world government" would be a terrible idea. I think the trend should be the opposite more accountability by getting closer to the public. With all its faults, something I like about the UK system is the political accountability to constituents. MPs are required in their job description to defend their own constituents interests. I'm not defending a "lean" state, I'm saying that mega-governments will eventually just view the world from the balcony of the megapolis ivory tower, since the bureaucratic weight of being present in all corners of the whole world would be too much. You can see that in many developing and developed countries. You have a national government, in its own bubble in the capital and far-away corners of the country are invisible. Decentralisation would be impossible, by definition, in a world gov, IMO. PS: I'm not against pan-national orgs or efforts like the EU. The process of sitting around a table and discussing the big issues is essential, in my view. Even legal and economic harmonisation. I'm against Brexit, but if anything, a positive of Brexit is that it showed the EU is not a "government". There is an escape clause and people can leave it. How do you leave a "world government"?
sparkie 4y ago
The author, being an obvious Star Trek fan, should be asking "What can we do as a species to prevent ourselves becoming the Borg?" He might arrive at an alternative conclusion.
gmuslera 4y ago
The map is not the territory, you should contrast ideas with realities to see how that is playing out in smaller scales, to have a hint on how it could end in the biggest one. One of the most urgent planetary problems right now is climate change, and the closest we have to world government are US and EU, the first denying and boicotting global measures against it since the 90s, the second taking back their pledges as they is some struggle in their gas and oil inputs. Unless you have a god, aliens or a perfect AI (the usual saviors/unifiers in fiction, and we might be as far from the third than from the first one) as government, humans will still go for their own good, in their own scale, with big players pursuing their own benefit influencing whatever is in the global government.
stareatgoats 4y ago
This post is flagged for some reason - maybe because it attracts our basest instincts and discussion will not be constructive, but maybe more likely because people feel strongly against the assertion in the title. But I'm going to out on a limb and agree with the author. Not only that, we will most probably have a world government for many of the reasons mentioned, but mainly because after the next big war, it will become evident for everyone still alive that we can't have individual nations going on a rampage with nuclear weapons (biological weapons, etc take your pick) any more. It will probably not look like a national government, it simply will enable the rule of law, globally. Which is what we need. Preferably before the next big war.

30 points by galfarragem 4y ago

invig 4y ago

I’m sure there’s no chance of corruption becoming an issue within a single all powerful entity.

i5heu 4y ago
Not if this entity is publicly and totally surveilled with all its members.
- thatjoeoverthr 4y ago
  If you have a plan that will solve corruption in this way, try it on some existing states.
- kzrdude 4y ago
  I think you need accountability and regular rotation of leadership. There must be some reason that global sports organizations so often attract corruption. I'm thinking of UEFA, FIFA and many of the other less well known sports associations - FIDE for chess etc, and many more. They usually don't have a democratic governance structure and let interests of the involved people entrench themselves. I don't think total surveillance is enough.

usrn 4y ago

Based on how the EU and UN worked out a world government sounds like a disaster.

cpach 4y ago
IMHO, EU is a good example. However, it’s limited in both scope and area. Which is a good thing IMHO.
mnd999 4y ago
Neither of those are governments, the UN is a forum for discussion and is very much needed if not always enormously successful. The EU isn’t (obviously) global, but has actually been pretty successful. I actually think it’s a pretty good model, but the emphasis would have to be more on global issues such as climate change than trade.
telmo 4y ago
What do you mean? Nothing is perfect but the EU has been a net positive for its member states. It is approved of by a majority of its citizens across all countries. The EU created one of the most prosperous (for the common person), free and tolerant societies on earth. You can make all the snarky remarks you want, but if you were reincarnating right now as some random human and you learned that you reincarnated as a citizen of the EU, you would probably sigh in relief. In my experience, the strongest criticisms of the EU come from outsiders who would prefer to impose their views and preferences on how Europeans should live, and on the role that Europe should play in the world stage -- a more subservient one.
- bilvar 4y ago
  Have you asked anyone not German or French what do they think about living in the EU? I’m sure it’s turned out great for Germany and their lap dog, but let’s ask the Spanish, the Italians and especially the Greek and have this conversation again.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    AFAICT, the Germans and the French are more annoyed at bailing out the south than the south is at being bailed out. AFAICT the Greeks trust the EU government a heck of a lot more than they trust their own. Ask the Poles and Ukrainians about what they think about EU membership. By some metrics Poland is the fastest growing economy in the world.
    - bilvar 4y ago
      "AFAICT, the Germans and the French are more annoyed at bailing out the south than the south is at being bailed out." The Germans and the French were more than happy betting on Italian and Greek bonds which were junk-level and provided great yields. But, when in Greece's case the chickens came home to roost and their risk was about to materialize they forced a bailout program on the Greek people instead of allowing them to default. Having a country in the Eurozone defaulting their debt would have devastating impact on the Euro too, so there was double-whammy of incentives for the EU technocrats to bailout Greece. After the Greek economy got devastated, mainly German companies entered the Greek market and obliterated the local competition, especially in the retailer industry with brands like Lidl coming in and undercutting the Greek businesses which had been around for decades. Moreover, they bought out a lot of those Greek businesses for a piece of bread and merged them with their own. So Greek people were essentially spending their bailout money buying products from the Germans. At the end of the day, Germany was moving money from one pocket to the other and also making interest on top of it. No EU technocrat bailed out Greece out of kindness. Now of course, the propaganda machine will lament every day to the average Joe about how the lazy Italians and Greeks are stealing their money. So the 'annoyance' is understandable. "AFAICT the Greeks trust the EU government a heck of a lot more than they trust their own." False. They distrust them equally and for different reasons. "Ask the Poles and Ukrainians about what they think about EU membership. By some metrics Poland is the fastest growing economy in the world." I don't know Polish people and I don't know what their sentiment towards the EU is. The Ukranians have no idea what it is to be a member of the EU, they can't know from the outside. If just the fact that a country wants to join the EU is an indicator of how great the EU is, then the other way round is also true (UK, Switzerland and Norway not wanting to join, or several countries having a 'leaving' sentiment brewing within).

Paul_S 4y ago

That's no different than saying I believe we need world peace. It's not a very interesting thing to say. If you have an idea how to bring this about then that would interesting to read - a probable process of creating a world government.

cpach 4y ago

It’s an interesting idea. I know that both Carl Bildt (Swedish politician) and Bard/Söderqvist (Swedish authors) have been thinking about this. I’m not convinced though. There are so many Trumps, Erdogans, Orbans etc in the world and too many people who enable them.

voldacar 4y ago

Governments are at their core, service providers. Monopolies tend not to provide good services. And when the world government abuses you, you will have nowhere else to go.

cpach 4y ago
Mars? ;-)
enykeev 4y ago
So it sounds like we need multiple world governments operating over the same area rather than having a bunch of monopolies around the globe.
- ilammy 4y ago
  Which is exactly what we already have. There is what your local government says you should be doing, and there is what your friendly (or not so much) neighborhood superpowers say your government should be doing.
  - kzrdude 4y ago
    We also already have in most countries a hierarchy of governments - a state government, a central government, etc. In the EU we certainly have regional government, member state government and EU institutions. All of these are different shades of government and in some cases conflict with each other. In some areas EU has been a boon - a "safety valve" where the member state government is put into a competitive system where it has to align itself with external expectations from the EU institutions. I.e. breaking up their monopoly power in that sense. Some national governments want/wanted to completely control the sale of medicine, foods, alcohol etc and to some extent EU has broken up that control.
  - jokethrowaway 4y ago
    Incorrect, we should have multiple hospital providers and multiple protection services available in the same space. Moving country is not always easy

trbh 4y ago

Climate change etc. should be handled by international agreements. If there is no competition between countries, governments tend to turn their despotic energies on their own citizens. There would be nowhere for Snowden or Assange to go. If your social credit score is ruined, it is ruined worldwide. The military would be used to suppress the population. I'm very certain that a world government would turn into a Stalinist hell very quickly.

ultim8k 4y ago
As much as I want a single government without wars and nations, I believe that you are unfortunately right. A single entity is much easier to be corrupted and suppress humans. Perhaps there is still a way. I think EU is a good example. It has its problems but I can’t imagine Europe without it.

immigrantheart 4y ago

No, we humans are different. We don’t need one single entity telling all of us what to do. World government will just exarcebate civil wars.

inglor_cz 4y ago

"It seems obvious to me that planetary problems demand planetary government." That does not seem obvious to me at all. And I can't imagine a common set of governing principles acceptable to Iceland, China, Russia and the Taliban. For example, looking at what is currently rocking the U.S., what would be the global policy on abortion?

jka 4y ago
> what would be the global policy on abortion? The U.N. Human Rights Committee has a recent (2019) publication[1], "General comment no. 36, Article 6 (Right to Life)" that contains an entry that is relevant to this question. Page two, item eight under "General Remarks": "Although States parties may adopt measures designed to regulate voluntary termination of pregnancy, those measures must not result in violation of the right to life of a pregnant woman or girl, or her other rights under the Covenant. Thus, restrictions on the ability of women or girls to seek abortion must not, inter alia, jeopardize their lives, subject them to physical or mental pain or suffering that violates article 7 of the Covenant, discriminate against them or arbitrarily interfere with their privacy. States parties must provide safe, legal and effective access to abortion where the life and health of the pregnant woman or girl is at risk, or where carrying a pregnancy to term would cause the pregnant woman or girl substantial pain or suffering, most notably where the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest or where the pregnancy is not viable. In addition, States parties may not regulate pregnancy or abortion in all other cases in a manner that runs contrary to their duty to ensure that women and girls do not have to resort to unsafe abortions, and they should revise their abortion laws accordingly. For example, they should not take measures such as criminalizing pregnancy of unmarried women or applying criminal sanctions to women and girls who undergo abortion or to medical service providers who assist them in doing so, since taking such measures compels women and girls to resort to unsafe abortion. States parties should remove existing barriers to effective access by women and girls to safe and legal abortion, including barriers caused as a result of the exercise of conscientious objection by individual medical providers, and should not introduce new barriers. States parties should also effectively protect the lives of women and girls against the mental and physical health risks associated with unsafe abortions. In particular, they should ensure access for women and men, and especially girls and boys, to quality and evidence-based information and education on sexual and reproductive health and to a wide range of affordable contraceptive methods, and prevent the stigmatization of women and girls who seek abortion. States parties should ensure the availability of, and effective access to, quality prenatal and post-abortion health care for women and girls, in all circumstances and on a confidential basis." [1] - https://www.refworld.org/docid/5e5e75e04.html https://www.refworld.org/docid/5e5e75e04.html

imgabe 4y ago

People just aren’t that smart. Yes. We would like to have a group of super smart people who can tell us what to do and we can just do that and everything will work out great. Unfortunately, such people don’t exist. Sorry, you’ve got to figure it out for yourself.

freemade 4y ago
Yes exactly, and wait until you realize those random powerful people are simply petty rulers who have closets filled with skeletons and don't care about you or your community.

mberning 4y ago

No thanks. If you thought the grift and corruption within national governments was bad, this would put it on steroids. People claim to like democracy, but when they aren’t getting their way they want to rig the system or add yet another layer to it in hopes of “fixing it”. No. What we need is better people. Better technology. Better practical education. Etc. If men were angels no government would be necessary.

cryptica 4y ago

I used to think that global government would be a good idea but I now realize that this was incredibly naive. Now that I understand human nature better and how the worst aspects of human nature tend to concentrate around the centers of power, I cannot think of anything more dangerous than a world government. I actually advocate for the opposite; break up existing governments and make them smaller; no government should govern over more than 5 million people. Having lived in some small sovereign nations (with 500K to 1 million people) and also some big nations with over 70 million people, my feeling about big countries is that people are essentially treated like livestock. People get used to it, but coming from a small nation, it feels very wrong. People living under such powerful governments tend to adopt an overly compliant mentality and to some extent lose some of their humanity; it gets replaced by a kind of fear and apathy.

gus_massa 4y ago
There are 47 cities that have more than 5 million people in the official boundaries (71 if you count the surrounding area). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities
hotpotamus 4y ago
Exactly, this is why I started my own government, the Republic of Ingleside, where I'm the sovereign. We enforce a strict adherence to the state religion, Ingleside Abbeyism, which is actually how the whole thing started - existing religions provided me with inadequate tax write-offs, and the whole thing sort of snowballed from there, but the end result has proven to be quite satisfying now that I'm responsible for creating the laws that I must abide by; the more local government, the better.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

newaccount2021 4y ago

oifjsidjf 4y ago

1) If you centralize everything into one government: what if that one government becomes corrupt? Then you cannot run to any other governments. 2) Cultural differences will require that different populations operate and behave differently, you will never be able to put the same constraints on different cultures.

chii 4y ago
> Cultural differences will require that different populations operate and behave differently so you have local/regional government, responsible for local and regional policies. But global policies would be controlled by a global gov't.
- mpfundstein 4y ago
  sounds a lot like Russia
  - Garvey 4y ago
    Or the US with Federal and State law
    - kiliancs 4y ago
      Or pretty much everywhere, with a whole gradient of levels of autonomy.
herodoturtle 4y ago
Centralised government and democracy are not mutually exclusive.
- thoms_a 4y ago
  Democracy has become a mantra. It means nothing. There are many corrupt and dysfunctional democracies throughout the world.

freedom2099 4y ago

World government is our only hope!

sgt101 4y ago

I myself believe in the need for a world government. I will make a great and kind emperor. It's high time that everyone gets onboard with this.

raydiatian 4y ago

I recently read Ray Dalio’s Principles of The Changing World Order. He essentially claimed that at the scale of world governments, man’s capacity to operate an intergovernmental social contract is non-existent. It is not without an effort to make it so, it’s just that unless there is a bigger fish defining the rules of the game are fair, we sort of brush up against Darwinian nature. Essentially, if a nation possesses some opportunity but doesn’t possess the means to defend it, it belongs to whichever nation is strong enough to come and take it. Also, Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0 book has a fascinating fictional story about a company that uses AI to drive a new world order, back towards the center. It is both exceptionally hand-wavey but also not entirely unbelievable. Not necessarily trying to make a point or anything, just thoughts that this article reminded me of.

snidane 4y ago

World government makes sense so that coverage of responsibility would be extended over all common areas such as air and oceans. With decentralised govt there is no owner of oceans, it's a common pasture, so nobody prevents certain countries from hunting down all the whales until extinction and poor countries making ocean a dumpster for plastics that rich green countries recycled their plastics to. However, world government doesn't make sense before more planets are settled, because no governent model is perfect yet and the best model we have so far is a competition between states as to which model should prevail. Eg., you are a monarchy and your next king is a moron. Too bad, having democracy would have made this only temporary. You are a democracy and your country's media run by oligarchs found a way to rule by influencing masses. Too bad, if you had a king, he would imprison the oligarchs. There will be cycles in model of government in foreseeable future, so it is premature to decide on the one government style yet, so it is dangerous to do one and only world govt yet. Wait for Musk to colonize Mars at least.

jokethrowaway 4y ago
My government (in Europe) has been increasingly worse in the last 30 years (at least). That's just as bad as a monarchy if not worst. At least the monarchy takes drastic decisions (some good, some bad) but has all the power so they'll be held responsible. Kings still risk being executed or assassinated. Our governments keep saying they can't do anything because of the system and just keep pushing out laws that make life marginally worse for everyone over decades. Nobody even remembers politicians' name: they collectively risk way less than monarchs (who actually wield power, not expensive and useless stamp models, overpaid by the taxpayers, like the Queen of England)

vbezhenar 4y ago

I'm pretty sure we do have world government. May be not a single person, but something like a council of few most powerful persons. I bet they include Rothschild, Rockefeller, may be someone else. And most powerful governments are controlled by that council.

thoms_a 4y ago
More precisely, we have an aspirational world government led by the American Empire which is run by a few extremely wealthy and powerful elite families, including the ones you've alluded to. Of course, these powerful families own all the media companies and thus control how they are covered in the mainstream media, which explains their absence and subsequent emphasis on politically inconsequential billionaires like Musk. The American Empire is run via these families through a distributed influence network of private companies, NGOs, think tanks and PACs [1]. Although made up of many entities, they are funded by the same few individuals. Thus, this is a very difficult system to reform without immense capital expenditure. The countries which do not submit to this order are the designated public enemies (we have always been at war with Eastasia). Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea being the most prominent of these. Disclaimer: I am a deeply committed conspiracy theorist who also believes in the Earth being flat, so please take everything I say as the ramblings of a kook (especially any hardworking federal employees perusing HN)! 1. https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-brief-explanation-of-the-cathedral https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-brief-explanation-of-the...

aguacaterojo 4y ago

These things form when the will or the power to implement is there. I would think the possibility of such a unified cross cultural & properly effective institution would be down to power & strategic interests i.e. game theory. Humans will seek power when it's available and wield it to do things in their interest. Also a world government making decisions on "immigration" whose effects are distributed unevenly on its constituents. Look at Poland in the EU right now. https://www.bbc.com/news/59348337 https://www.bbc.com/news/59348337 "We could replace the war model with the policing model". How? Total fascism or weaker punitive measures? Also does the omission of one correlate strictly with the absence of the other? And over what time scale? Look up "Mediocristan" & "Extremistan" to get an understanding of how the urge to control from a top down level can blow up. "we could institute the basic human right of mobility on the planet" some ecosystems cannot support free mobility.

jokethrowaway 4y ago

The major flaw of any centralised entity is that power hungry and corrupt individuals will be attracted to the top and the honest people won't want to do anything with it. We already see it in our local governments. We even see it in larger corporations. It's even visible, with decreasing rarity based on the size of group, in a building administration group or in a group of friends who pool money to do something. This reasoning makes me think we should go to decentralisation and federation until the power being wielded is minuscole, ideally being limited only to your person and your private property. There can be several iterations, the ultimate being a free society where individuals are the only structure and transactions are an voluntary (eg. No governments at all, private everything)

HKH2 4y ago

Big countries such as the US, Russia and China are already difficult to manage due to their size. Won't that problem be exacerbated if you make one big country? Also, isn't it better to have split testing?

rvieira 4y ago

Personally, I think that a "world government" would be a terrible idea. I think the trend should be the opposite more accountability by getting closer to the public. With all its faults, something I like about the UK system is the political accountability to constituents. MPs are required in their job description to defend their own constituents interests. I'm not defending a "lean" state, I'm saying that mega-governments will eventually just view the world from the balcony of the megapolis ivory tower, since the bureaucratic weight of being present in all corners of the whole world would be too much. You can see that in many developing and developed countries. You have a national government, in its own bubble in the capital and far-away corners of the country are invisible. Decentralisation would be impossible, by definition, in a world gov, IMO. PS: I'm not against pan-national orgs or efforts like the EU. The process of sitting around a table and discussing the big issues is essential, in my view. Even legal and economic harmonisation. I'm against Brexit, but if anything, a positive of Brexit is that it showed the EU is not a "government". There is an escape clause and people can leave it. How do you leave a "world government"?

sparkie 4y ago

The author, being an obvious Star Trek fan, should be asking "What can we do as a species to prevent ourselves becoming the Borg?" He might arrive at an alternative conclusion.

gmuslera 4y ago

The map is not the territory, you should contrast ideas with realities to see how that is playing out in smaller scales, to have a hint on how it could end in the biggest one. One of the most urgent planetary problems right now is climate change, and the closest we have to world government are US and EU, the first denying and boicotting global measures against it since the 90s, the second taking back their pledges as they is some struggle in their gas and oil inputs. Unless you have a god, aliens or a perfect AI (the usual saviors/unifiers in fiction, and we might be as far from the third than from the first one) as government, humans will still go for their own good, in their own scale, with big players pursuing their own benefit influencing whatever is in the global government.

stareatgoats 4y ago

This post is flagged for some reason - maybe because it attracts our basest instincts and discussion will not be constructive, but maybe more likely because people feel strongly against the assertion in the title. But I'm going to out on a limb and agree with the author. Not only that, we will most probably have a world government for many of the reasons mentioned, but mainly because after the next big war, it will become evident for everyone still alive that we can't have individual nations going on a rampage with nuclear weapons (biological weapons, etc take your pick) any more. It will probably not look like a national government, it simply will enable the rule of law, globally. Which is what we need. Preferably before the next big war.