World Government

A recent online discussion I had with another blogger got me thinking about one world government. There are many conspiracy theorists out there who assert that there is some plot afoot to bring this about. That's not what I want to talk about. What I mean to discuss is what an actual world government would look like in the unlikely event that it was actually implemented.

First of all, I suspect that it would have some sort of representative democracy. If you were to compare the world as a whole to countries with a comparable economic output and distribution of income, democracy is reasonably viable. I don't think that the well off would find the political repression that they would have to implement to prevent it to be worthwhile.

In our own country and most of the other rich, industrial countries taxation would be a bit higher and there would be less in the form of government benefits. Redistribution of income would go international. The reverse would be the case in poor countries. There would be freer trade between what are now different countries.

I suspect that there would also be widespread unrest in predominantly Muslim parts of the world. A world government would not recognize the special status that many Muslims would like their religion to have under the law.

So world government would be likely to be popular with India, Sri Lanka and large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. It would not be so popular in Europe, predominantly Muslim countries and North America. How it would play out in Latin America is uncertain. I suspect that large parts of Latin America are wealthy enough that they would be net losers financially. In short I think that it would have too much opposition in too many parts of the world for any such plan to get off the ground.