Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian Swartz
Democracy helps, doing what you can with your own natural resources help, but it does not at all solve this or make it work, for a couple reasons. What happens when different democratic nations decide they have different interests from each other? Italy and other countries may be benevolent to San Marino, but they still absolutely have the economic power to tell San Marino to go pound sand if they wish. Same with Italy/Germany, UK/US, whatever.
Even more fundamentally though, this only works if there are enough democracies to control world resources. There are not. Take aluminum for example. China produces almost 10x as much as the second-largest producer. In terms of global reserves, neither the US or anyone in Europe outside of Russia is in the Top 10. Australia is, so they can help quite a bit, but they produce less than a 20th of what China does. There are many resources this is true for.
The point is, unless democratic countries completely dominate the globe to the point where authoritarian ones are non-factors (which would make this entire conversation academic), there are key resources that any modern society relies upon that they can't make themselves in sufficient quantities because there simply aren't physically enough of those resources in those countries to meet the demand. It's admittedly simplistic, binary, and misleading to divide the world into free/authoritarian segments, but even under that view each relies on the other - neither is or can be self-sufficient. They can get closer than they are, but the mutual dependence is just a fact of life.
This is one part of why we're going to continue to have issues until we realize the necessity, as a species, of a global government.
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I don't know. I still don't buy how the Federation somehow survived the onslaught of the Borg.
How would this necessity work? Who decides who is in power and, more importantly, who keeps the Putins and the Kings George from abusing that power?
What do we do about the people who feel oppressed under such a government? When Yugoslavia fell, it broke into so many pieces and factions we may still be counting them 100 years from now. Europe, with its 44 countries, and counting, at least is figuring out that there needs to be some sort of union. But any further than that and the problems become severe.
As for resources - the idea is that you do your part. If you have something to trade, you're in the game or you're reliant on someone who is in the game. We've created this China monster - 1.5 billion people who live under communist control - because we insist that they use those people as slaves to mine what we're no longer willing to mine and sew together what we're no longer willing to sew together and burn the fuels that we're no longer willing to burn.
I don't know how it all works, but there's a shift coming and China's version of a world government is not one I think we can share.