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re: Cabal...
Tom Brosz — (archived)

What I had in mind was a proper working United Nations in which individual nations were represented in a similar way to the states within the USA or Australia.

It would not just be an energy authority but a political, environmental, and social authority.

Obviously, this a distant possibility in today's world and would be oposed by many special interest groups therefore likely will never emerge...

What I was trying to say is that WITHOUT such an ultimate authority, each nation will continue to act in it's own self interest but to the detriment of the common good.

One of the things I have trouble explaining to people is that the very nature of collectivism is the reason it fails, and creates so much havoc in the world.

Even granting your premise of a "cleaned up" United Nations, the idea that somehow, collecting representatives of every nation in the world is going to result in a sudden outbreak of large-scale selfless thinking about the "common good" is a bit naive.

Such a group would probably end up doing exactly what the U.N. is trying to do. Rearrange laws and the flow of money to loot the prosperous nations in favor of those that are not, and tilt things in favor of their own nations. In the case of small nations, crippling the big ones sounds pretty attractive.

Even if they don't do that, the power-hungry utopians around the world will gravitate to this power structure like flies to a dead rhino. Pretty soon you'll see all kinds of wonderful ideas.

And without a single exception, every one will involve the increase of their own centralized power, and the crippling of the rights of the individual. For the common good, of course, as always.

If someone floats an idea to outlaw any cars that go faster than 40 miles per hour, or mandating that everyone use mass transit in certain areas, or forcing conversion to solar energy by 2025, or any of a number of other ideas I've actually heard proposed over the years, then the thought of an international organization with a gun big enough to make the world obey would give them a stiffie you could cut glass with.

That being said, your point that property rights end when you dump your trash on your neighbor's lawn is a valid one, even in a libertarian scenario. In an ideal world, a world government might have legitimate authority in these areas. Unfortunately, almost everyone around the world I've seen pushing world government tends to think of government more along the lines of Marx and less along the lines of Jefferson.

At this point, the old lines of communication and international peer-to-peer agreements might be the way to go. Such agreements have been successful in many areas of commerce, like shipping, fishing, airline traffic, and others. Pollution agreements and treaties could work as well, without having to create some all-powerful "uber authority" to enforce them.

The main problem with Kyoto was not that the idea of such an agreement was impossible, but that this particular one was obviously written more to cut the West off at the knees than it was to deal with CO2. The first version was DOA the minute it excluded massive polluter China. No rational agreement on CO2 would have done so.

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