World Government
I’d like to do an informal poll of my Tumblr followers: would a (democratically elected) world government be an obviously good thing, or an obviously bad thing?
Not that this would be achievable in the foreseeable future. I can’t imagine China, Saudi Arabia, etc. allowing genuinely free and fair elections for World Parliament on their soil any time soon. But if?
I’m posting this because world government strikes me as an obviously good thing, but I mentioned this to @cptsdcarlosdevil and they were like “Whaaat?” So I want to check attitudes to world government more broadly in the kind of people who would follow me on Tumblr.
Also, if you’re in the “obviously bad” camp, I’m curious to know why (unless your reasons boil down to “because government is bad”, I’m pretty sure I have some anarchist followers, but “because anarchism” isn’t interesting).
You are proposing
WORLD CONQUEST
Different people want to live under different laws, because social externalities exist (consider noise), and because efficiencies of scale exist in the distribution of social goods (consider it’s generally not worth building a church for one person).
Therefore, in order to establish a world government, you must crush all opposing cultures until they can no longer challenge the government or be cohesive enough to form a polity. They would naturally resist this, up to and including by force of arms if necessary.
Additionally, world government is a single point of failure, and failure of a world government would be catastrophic. It’s a single point of control for all of humanity, which makes it extremely valuable to seize control of by any means necessary. Without competition from external polities, it is also likely to be corrupt and authoritarian as fuck, because THERE IS NOWHERE ELSE TO GO.
Anyone wanting to live differently from the approved consensus will need to go into open rebellion and fight the World Government for control.
Further, competition would not actually end just because you established one overpolity. It would simply change form.
Why would you think making a government inescapable would somehow improve its quality?
You are proposing
WORLD CONQUEST
Speaking as a firm NWO supporter: this is true, and it’s important to acknowledge the fact if you’re doing anything more concrete than speculating about political philosophy in the most abstract terms. Not necessarily for any of the reasons that @mitigatedchaos talks about, but…if nothing else, sovereigns and ruling elites are not going to be interested in giving up their power to a global government, they will not go down without a fight, and existing ideologies are such that they will often be able to rally armies in their defense (no matter how great the global government might be).
Different people want to live under different laws, because social externalities exist (consider noise), and because efficiencies of scale exist in the distribution of social goods (consider it’s generally not worth building a church for one person).
Eh. This is ultimately no different from a government at any other scale. (Especially given that people’s most fervent conflicts are with their neighbors, and that their interest in reshaping the rules tends to center on getting an advantage in those conflicts.) One of the main functions of any government is to say “there is no enforceable remedy for your problem, if you try to enforce a remedy yourself we will send our thugs to kick your teeth in, you’re just going to have to suck it up.” Which is good and important! People’s problems are often things like “my children are not showing me sufficient deference” or “that person over there is being blasphemously weird.” There are cases in which it’s advantageous to have different rules in different places, and a single central government can make that happen – as you see with, e.g., any city that has more than one kind of zoning – but the simple fact that two people want to live under different rulesets isn’t much indicative of anything.
Why would you think making a government inescapable would somehow improve its quality?
Because, while governments do occasionally do bad things because of venality or zealotry or sheer incompetence, they usually do bad things because of their incessant struggles to outcompete their rivals – meaning both “external governments who might take their resources” [of whatever kind] and “internal insurgents who might supplant them” [by whatever means]. The inescapable tyrant is the only tyrant whose motivations even begin to start lining up with those of his subjects.
How is your proposed 1WG getting rid of the problem of “internal insurgents who might supplant them”? Assuming you can get 1WG in the first place, you’ve just moved all of the conflicts from the “external” to the “internal” column, without necessarily reducing their number or intensity.
Are you presupposing a Moldbuggian omnipotent autarch whose resources are so great that no competitors ever even try?
Sadly, superpowered aliens interested in being benevolent autarchs are in short supply. (And I do not share Moldbug’s faith that a single-minded lust for gold would translate into good policy.)
The short answer is: this is an important and difficult question, man. Having a central government that is massively larger and stronger than any potential rivals gets you some of the distance; having a leadership selection structure that avoids the constant stream of system-legitimated insurgent rivals helps too; so does doing a good job of creating a network of government-supported elites who will fight against government-destroying would-be elites; but a lot of it comes down to establishing legitimacy, and if I knew how to do that I wouldn’t be mucking around on Tumblr.