Five Hypotheses

1. We cannot curb climate change without a carbon tax.

2. No carbon tax will work unless it is global.

3. A global carbon tax cannot be legitimate unless it is levied by a representative assembly, practicing democracy on a global scale.

4. Such an assembly will be democratic only if it is accountable to individual voters themselves,  not to any aggregate groups such as nation states.

5. This type of assembly could be elected in this century.

Taking advantage . . .

Taking advantage of Somalia's lack of a government, foreign fleets descended on the Somalian coast, often within the territorial limit, and began overfishing stocks that coastal communities had recently begun to harvest for themselves. With no coast guard to protect their interests and no voice in the international community, local fishermen began seizing and ransoming foreign fishing vessels and their crews. This retributive privateering quickly attracted the interest of local warlords, terrorists, and others who expanded the scope of their operations to seize piratically and indiscriminately anything from container ships and tankers to cruise ships and private yachts regardless of flag. While this has become an obvious criminal problem, the underlying cause, namely illegal fishing, is a more disturbing threat to the global commons.

Lincoln Paine, The Sea and Civilization. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 595.

One can live by dogma . . .

One can live by dogma or by discovery. Dogmas (from the Greek for received opinions that “seem good") may seem to unify people (as is the implied intent of religious dogma, religio being Latin for “binding together") but insofar as dogma must be taken on faith it winds up bifurcating humanity into a faithful us and a suspect other. Scientific discovery might have divided the world, but instead has found that all human beings are kin---to one another and to all other living things---in a universe where stars and starfish alike obey the same physical laws. So as we humans move from dogma toward discovery, we increasingly find ourselves inhabiting one world.

Timothy Ferris, The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 261.

It may take many years . . .

It may take many years to achieve such an addition to the body of world law. In the meantime, much could be done through a change in the policies of the great nations. During recent years insurrections and civil wars in small countries have been instigated and aggravated by the great powers, which have moreover provided weapons and military advisers, increasing the savagery of the wars and the suffering of the people. In four countries during 1963 and several others during preceding years, democratically elected governments, with policies in the direction of social and economic reform, have been overthrown and replaced by military dictatorship, with the approval, if not at the instigation of one or more of the great powers. These actions of the great powers are associated with policies of militarism and national economic interest that are now antiquated. I hope that the pressure of world opinion will soon cause them to be abandoned and to be replaced by policies that are compatible with the principles of morality, justice, and world brotherhood.

Linus Pauling,  Nobel Lecture. December 11, 1963. URL: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1962/pauling-lecture.html

 

In the spring of 1968 . . .

In the spring of 1968, shortly before I graduated from Yale, my father returned to campus to visit me and attend his twenty-fifth reunion. He ran into [Cord] Meyer at a bar set up for alumni in their blazers and bow ties and big blue lapel buttons announcing their name and class. “The world is in a fight to the death between us and the other side,” growled Meyer, “and I am the Lord High Executioner.”

Strobe Talbot, The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 211.

If and when . . .

If and when the advocates of democratic reform in the Soviet Union succeed, we can look forward also to the day when the repressed Eastern European peoples are allowed to choose their own political leadership freely. . . . Many forms of international cooperation about which now we can only dream would then become possible to make this a safer and more prosperous world. Once again the construction of a world legal order to replace the anarchy of competing nation-states would appear on the agenda of far-sighted and practical statesmen, and what seemed briefly possible after World War II would have a second chance.

Cord Meyer, Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA. (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 408-409.

Medieval doctors . . .

Medieval doctors held the state  to be a consequence---or wages---of original sin. A sin-proof society could sing and frisk ad lib, with everyone “crowned and mitred” as his self's emperor and pope, and the harness of collective government packed away in a museum of prehistory.

What kind of community do those modern doctors have in mind when they say that there is no world community for a World Government?

Is this city, Chicago, a community in the sense, we guess, that they mean? Do the tenants of the Negro belt drop in for tea at the mansions of the North Side? Is Cicero, on our western border, the shrine of Saint Alph Capone? Yet this city has a municipality, a government, and Cicero has too. Plenty of common causes---lighting, water, sewage, conveyances, roads, parks, hospitals, schools, churches, yes, courts, yes, jails---hold their millions together. Force, governmental, lays its decisive accent on the consent, insures the continuity of the covenant in spite of race or creed, open feud or rampant revolt.

Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Foundations of the World Republic. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 26.