"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?
Abortion isn't a global problem, it's a local problem. The citizens of Africa aren't victimized because Texas bans abortion.
The citizens of Africa are victimized when Texas subsidizes oil production.
I'm not a fan of a world government, but a mechanism for dealing with the problems of sharing resources and dealing with free riders and the race to the bottom would be appreciated.
Probably none. I agree with the author that we need world government, but it would be stupid to have the highest level of government stipulate all laws for every nation, state, province, county, town and village beneath it.
One could say that about the Americans but they do it almost compulsively, and completely ignore levels of government where nearly everything actually happens. Many current American problems are locally managed including housing and real estate but so much energy goes to the President, partly because he -pertains to- so many people. Many people are explicit that whatever is on their minds must be done “nationally”. What’s to stop this pattern from repeating at a greater scale?
What’s to stop this pattern from repeating at a greater scale?
A well-designed constitution would be a start.
Not that there is an air-tight guarantee that a government won't turn bad. But we currently have over a half dozen governments with nuclear weapons. On the whole, I'd rather just worry about one.
I'd be uncomfortable emphatically staking a position on the whether a global government would go bad. There are many factors aside from ideology that determine if a government functions well; if someone tells me "I'm forming a new liberal democracy" it is too little information to predict if it will be a good one, or a bad one.
People do overestimate the risk that a nuclear war would lead to human extinction. Unfortunately, people also overestimate, gravely, the capacity of humanity to refrain from nuclear war. It has been less than a century since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we've come close to a nuclear conflict on several occasions.
“I’m forming a new government, and everyone is subject to it and you can’t leave,” is a heavy enough ask for me to take my chances and oppose it. It’s also not clear to me how you plan to bring the nuclear powers in question to heel without some sort of a war.
I assumed it was understood that entry of any country into a world government would be decided by a referendum. In normal times, most people see the benefit in cooperation. If it is impossible to imagine the people of a nation voting to join a world government, that is because we are living in strange times.
The reason we have to force states into the 21st century is because they are holding the cities hostage. Local government only works if you keep going all the way down.
If Austin can't make abortion legal, Texas can't make it illegal.
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."
In no other case is a human being, living or dead, legally required to give up their organs, bodily fluids, or other part of themselves, nor to literally risk their lives, for another human being.
Corpses have more bodily autonomy than women after Dobbs.
> In no other case is a human being, living or dead, legally required to give up their organs, bodily fluids, or other part of themselves, nor to literally risk their lives, for another human being.
In many other cases are humans legally required to literally risk their lives for another human being. Would you like me to give you examples?
> Corpses have more bodily autonomy than women after Dobbs.
I guess this is something US specific?
You have not addressed anything in the comment you're replying to. I think the right to abortion is the less bad of the two options, but I can also understand the people who say that abortion is murder. Can't you?
If abortion is murder, then is refusing to donate your kidney when someone else needs it to live also murder?
Is refusing to donate blood, bone marrow, etc, murder?
Is not mandating the donation of viable organs after death murder?
None of these things are required of people, in the name of bodily autonomy. None of these inactions are considered murder. And yet you expect women to donate their bodies for 9 months to something that is not yet a person, and take the very, very real risk of injury, permanent disability, or death, and the near-certainty that their bodies will never be the same again, to support what you call a human life.
The logic does not follow. It does not matter whether life begins at conception, at first heartbeat, at differentiated brain development, or at birth: In no case other than pregnancy is a human being societally expected or legally required to give even a part of their body to keep another human being alive, regardless of how safe the procedure may be.
Abortion is action/active/doing harm. Refusing to donate is inaction/passive/allowing harm. The distinction is significant, search 'passive vs active killing'. There is also more structural / 'algorithmic' solution for it in St. Aquinas' Double Effect Principle. Hint: doing harm is never moral.
Positive and negative rights are different. There is a negative right to life, there is no positive right to life. Ergo, you are forbidden from actions that cause somebody's death in general and you are not compelled to actions that prevent somebody's death in general. Existence of a negative rights does not imply a corresponding positive right.
And in the inverse, a few months ago I saw a lot users here arguing in favor of forcing Covid vaccinations against the person’s will to protect immunocompromised. Where do you stand on that?
Authoritarian is forcing a mother to have a child she doesn’t want! It’s her body! If you force your opinion on something that should be exclusively her concern then you are the “authoritarian”
I think the argument is that there is effectively zero difference in a 39 week old fetus and a newborn baby, so that argument only works if you're willing to extend the logic to getting rid of a newborn to...OR we acknowledge that there has to be a cutoff somewhere in the pregnancy where abortions are no longer acceptable.
Otherwise, we're pretending sentience is magically conveyed as the baby passes through the birth canal, which is silly.
It's not a trick question, it's a recognition that abortion support is rarely binary. The majority of people (even pro-choice) believe there is a point in the pregnancy where an elective abortion would be grotesque and shouldn't be allowed. What drives the divide in the debate is where we should draw that line. Conception? Viability? Birth?
It's the fundamental point in the debate, so it's far from a trick question?
a) You're moving the goalposts by inserting the word "elective" that was not there before.
b) As Mr Buttigieg said, ""If it's that late in your pregnancy, then almost by definition, you've been expecting to carry it to term" - engage with that instead of repeating yourself?
> One singular example of an abortion at 39 weeks where the mother didn't want the baby. I guarantee you can't actually find one even though you claim it exists
> It's the fundamental point in the debate
It is not, or should not be.
> believe there is a point ... shouldn't be allowed.
Again, should be a medical decision between patient and doctor, not a legal one, and not a numeric comparison.
Dr Kermit Gosnell performed a number of elective abortions that late in term, and we only know about those because he was dumb enough to get caught killing a few after delivery.
See this is the trick, the sleight-of hand - is draws you into arguing about unsubstantiated, viscerally affecting irrelevancies and hopes that you won't notice that this diverts from the substance.
The mother decided to have unprotected sex. There’s a reason women get pregnant. This isn’t some magical thing that is forced on women. Cause and effect.
The body inside her body is not hers. Unfortunately biology does not conform to our fantasyland.
Forcing those who are against this to pay a fine is against their will.
This is such bulshit! First and foremost willing unprotected sex is not the only reason for getting pregnant! Contraceptive are not 100% effective and there is rape. Second the body inside her might not belong to her (although… debatable) but her body is still hers and therefore she is entitled to remove anything inside of her. Third sometimes there are medical reasons for abortions (Malta recently almost killed a mother that had a miscarriage… the child was 100% going to die but as long as the fetus’ heart was beating they could not remove it and therefore the mover risked sepsis)
A twisted example based on your comment: should be allowed to remove tumours? They have a slightly different DNA from the host therefore they are not “property” of the sick and therefore should be left there!
I know, a different opinion on a left wing dominant forum. It’s pretty wild.
> First and foremost willing unprotected sex is not the only reason for getting pregnant! Contraceptive are not 100% effective and there is rape.
I address this in another comment below.
> Third sometimes there are medical reasons for abortions (Malta recently almost killed a mother that had a miscarriage… the child was 100% going to die but as long as the fetus’ heart was beating they could not remove it and therefore the mover risked sepsis)
You’re citing very rare events to support the main issue which is the majority of abortions are out of convenience, which is where the main issue is.
For these rare events there can be middle ground found here.
> Second the body inside her might not belong to her (although… debatable) but her body is still hers and therefore she is entitled to remove anything inside of her.
> A twisted example based on your comment: should be allowed to remove tumours? They have a slightly different DNA from the host therefore they are not “property” of the sick and therefore should be left there!
This is arguing the same point in my opinion. The tumor does not grow into a human. The tumor is not able to survive outside of the womb in a NICU as a human.
It was bulshit not because it was a different opinion but because it was a very poor argument!
An embryo is incapable of surviving outside of the womb! A fetus might if it’s old enough!
Nobody anywhere perform abortions at a stage where the fetus could survive without the mother in an nicu!
An embryo I agree cannot survive out of the womb, but what an embryo is, is a stage of human life. It’s still a human. Let’s not start trying to decide who is human enough to live.
In Colorado you can get an abortion up to 9 months. There’s legislation trying to pass abortion allowance up to the moment of birth, and some have been recently successful in passing. Many states in the US allow abortions in 2nd trimester which is where a baby can survive outside the womb in a NICU.
My understanding of the pro life view is that if someone chooses to put sperm in there, they are agreeing to give up some bodily autonomy and carry the child to birth.
Or she was raped, or nobody taught her anything but religious abstinence bullshit and she didn't even know the ramifications.
> The body inside her body is not hers
So if you take that "body" inside her out of her, what happens to it? It dies unless it's the late stages (what, 6 months in?) It's entirely dependent on her to grow to become a human being.
You should stop bringing rape or incest on this subject, it’s not useful to the cause.
Abortion should be a a right regardless of the reasons. It’s not more of a right because the woman was raped. In both cases, they don’t want a thing growing in their uterus, no matter their reasons.
The real problem is, in my opinion: should we force a human to maintain another human against their will? What if we could extract the fetus and grow it in vitro instead of aborting it? In the same vein, does a parent legally have to be an organ donor for their child?
These are questions we can answer and debate on even if we disagree on whether a fetus is alive or not.
Rape is less than 2% of abortions. Even then, because my father was a horrible person I shouldn’t have to die for it. We don’t need to use rare edge cases to validate the 98% of abortions which are out of convenience.
I’m not talking about abstinence, plenty of birth control options are available. Men need to take more responsibility and wear a condom.
> So if you take that "body" inside her out of her, what happens to it? It dies unless it's the late stages (what, 6 months in?) It's entirely dependent on her to grow to become a human being.
Yes this is biology, and? If you ever had to visit a NICU you’ll see plenty of 20 some week old pre-mature babies (or “bodies” in your case) that are just as human as you and I. They are just in a different stage in life. They need food to survive, just like you and I. I have a 1 year old, he is dependent on me to grow and survive.
If they are born it’s not an abortion anymore! Although I do support euthanasia… had I had some serious defect I wish my parents had the decency to kill me early on or have an abortion.
So a human female and a human male copulate and they conceive something not-human? What species is it if it is not Homo sapiens? If it is not Homo sapiens, why does it apparently have human DNA (distinct from either the female and male that were involved)?
Why is it that when two humans copulate, they produce something not-human, but when every other mammal pairs copulate they produce something of the same species?
In your opinion when does it go from being not-human to being human? Is is gradual, on a spectrum? Or is it binary: at a certain point in development there is some characteristic that becomes present
Judaism, as an example, does not consider the embryo to be human, but instead to be 'potential human', and doesn't consider it human or ensouled until it is birthed. A large number of people who believe abortion is murder do so because they are Christian, a religion that spawned from Judaism, yet they don't even understand their Old Testament as well as the Jews do.
En embryo might eventually become a human but is not one yet! You need a decently developer brain at least… being a small agglomeration of cells with human dna doesn’t make you a human! A tumor is an agglomeration of cells with human dna but is not treated as a person!
On general is a gradual process… but like with every fuzzy system it is easy in some case to say if something belongs ta a category or not but when you reach the overlap of categories to becomes harder. Just set the threshold when it is still clear
It's not her body since conception. It's another human's body inside her body.
I personally don't think we should have governments protecting lives or rights or anyone - therefore if abortion happens that's unfortunate but I wouldn't spend resources chasing that.
That said abortion is obviously murder and immoral, no matter how convenient it can be.
That you claim 'abortion is obviously murder' shows you don't even understand the position of those who claim it isn't. Go do more research on the side you don't hold.
An embryo is a stage of being a human. As you say, you were an embryo yourself. It's only because we can't see it that we feel it's not human enough and can be killed. The thought of not being "human enough" doesn't bode well in our history, especially around the 1940s timeframe.
A spermatozoon is a stage of being human… so is an “egg cell” but nobody is forcing people to allow them all to develop into humans! And no… the nazi example has nothing to do with it (and I say it as a person whom all grandparents got sent to concentration camps by nazis)
This argument at its core is trying to justify at what stage of development this is considered human enough to protect. I think it’s a similar line of thinking as eugenics.
Based on my limited knowledge of the history of societies, an external threat, perceived by ordinary people to acutely and in actuality threaten their livelihoods, is historically a common driver of major change in societal power dynamics.
The rise (those damn Christians!) and fall (those damn Goths and Huns!) of Rome, the fall of Napoleon’s rule (those damn Russians!), the rise of Hitler (those damn Jews!), USA after Pearl Harbor (those damn Japanese!), downfall of Germany in 1945 (this damn war!), end of the Japanese imperial era (those damn bombs!) and the subsequent Americanization of Japan, fall of Great Britain’s monarchy after the war (those damn royalty!), the late 60’s major loss of civil liberties in the US (those damn blacks!), the entire Gaddafi affair (those damn clan monarchs / those damn Yankees!), USA becoming a surveillance state after 9/11 (those damn terrorists!), rise of the Taliban (those damn Yankees again!) …
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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)
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
"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.
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.
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)!
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.
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.
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.
》The EU created one of the most prosperous (for the common person), free and tolerant societies on earth.
House arrest several months a year, forced experimental vaccination, forbidden to heat house at winter, soon forbidden to use car, forced indoctrination of children, oposition parties banned or under surveillance, censorship, surveillance of private communications, overt racism and sexism...
My family has been through many regimes. Current one is not "free" or "tolerant". And it is not even prosperous, if young family can not afford house and children!
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.
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.
"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).
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.
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?