Via UN Watch:
Crazy but true: Iran and Saudi Arabia, countries that systematically violate women’s rights, are now poised to become governing board members of the new U.N. agency for women’s rights.
Elections will be held on November 10, 2010. The Asian group of states nominated Iran and Saudi Arabia on their uncontested 10-nation list.
The right of women and girls not to be hanged, stoned, or lashed for medieval crimes should not be turned into a joke.
There is a petition against this excrudescence of silliness hosted by the World Jewish Congress, a body which seems to be quite sincere in its desire to reform the UN. A fat lot of good it will do them. I’m old enough to remember when — according to the UN — the only two evil countries on the planet were South Africa and Israel. This at the same time the world was afflicted with the likes of Pol Pot, Bokassa, Idi Amin, Galtieri, Papa Doc…
Of course, it could be that this body is the UN’s equivalent of MAFF (which became known in the UK as ‘Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fuckups’ because it did so little for Agriculture, Farming and Food). That is, it exists to to undermine women’s rights, not support them…
95 Comments
In Yes, Minister it was explained that government departments are tombstones. “The Ministry of Employment marks the grave of British employment, and the Ministry of Industry marks the grave of British industry”, as I vaguely recall it.
I recall a similar thing when notoriously abusive countries were put on the UN bodies associated with more general human rights. “The Economist” pointed out this could be a good thing because it allowed extra pressure to be put on those countries. It even suggested, half seriously, moving the main offices to the countries concerned so the data collected would be better, and agencies like the IAEA to North Korea.
At the very least, those countries get good data on just how bad they are in the rankings.
I cannot see the Saudi political system as being redeemable – Iran just needs some way of getting rid of the “upper house” which is made up of 100% clerics who get to invalidate candidates for the “lower house” – a bit like if the Catholic church appointed priests as an upper house for Italy. Iran at least has well-educated women.
But the UN has its own problem with its “upper house”, the security council. Get rid of that, and make UN General Assembly a bit more like a normal representative chamber, without the artificial demarcation lines for voting for such bodies, and there might be a chance.
If only the mouths at the UN could be directly elected by the populations concerned, those elections run by the UN not the country concerned, providing a means of the populations getting a voice /despite/ their regimes.
That is just so ridiculous. Sigh.
Dave, I am a bit scared at your apparent understanding of the UN. Getting rid of the security council would be excellent from my perspective of wanting shot of the whole stupid thing.
But if you think the thing’s worth keeping, the security council is basically the sanity-valve on the general assembly. The Iranians and Sauds et al can’t buy the security council (well they can buy vetos, see France, Iraq war, etc).
This is a really scary idea. Except, does anyone take any notice of the UN any more, so does it matter? But what a stupid message to be sending.
Actually, I’ll go against the flow on this. Depending on how many people are on the panel, I don’t see it as such a bad idea to bring these sorts of states into it, as it would force them to justify their position, and having them within a greater organization may force them to act in a less extreme way than they would if they were entirely outside the system. I also agree with Dave about Iran vs. Saudia Arabia. I’m sure Iran could become and hopefully will become an entirely decent country in my life-time, but Saudia Arabia will remain a dump. This is because to get anywhere, you need an educated population, but once they get educated, they get sick of taking crap from the government (this is China’s problem too). I think Saudia Arabia is happy to not get anywhere, unlike Iran.
Alternatively, I do disagree about the UN security panel, which of course has some of the most dangerous countries in it (the US and Russia). This probably isn’t such a bad thing — If it was constructed of NZ, Norway and Scotland, we would only get furious agreement that no-one would listen to.
Dave’s right that things in Iran are more complicated than the propaganda would have you believe. In partiular, Shia Islam has traditionally had nothing against women being educated or earning a living – quite the reverse, in fact . Which is NOT to say that Iran is a poster-child for women’s rights who deserve their place on this UN council – just that there are important shades of grey here that make their nomination not quite as absurd as that of Saudi Arabia.
Of course, we can expect the US to oppose Iran’s nomination while supporting their good friends the Saudis …
The distinction between Iran and Saudi Arabia could not be starker, and it is not a Muslim sectarian thing, it’s an Arab vs. Persian thing. Not all Muslims are Arabs. Ethnicity matters at least as much as religion. The reason why there is Sunni vs. Shia in the first place is because Persians were not Arabs.
Conrad, equal points with DB for touching naïveté!
These guys are represented in the UNHRC currently includes Cuba ( a vice president no less), China, Guatemala, Kyrgyzstan (actually the Kyrgyz Republic I think), Libya, Pakistan and Russia.
I think the real point of membership of these organisation is to protect yourself and your friends from negative comment and get another boot into the Jooz, the Yanks and the ‘West’ in that order.
C@6 Yes, Iran is better than Saudi Arabia on women’s rights. Of course, if any country is worse than Saudi Arabia on women’s rights, I am unaware of it. (That Khomeini had daughters — one of whom is professor of Philosophy at Teheran University — and was a Qur’an literalist helped.)
Still, I go with “Ayatollah, leave those kids alone!”.
The UN is an occasionally useful forum that is only vaguely functional due to the Security Council. (And it would be better if India was a Permanent Member too.)
But it is also a frequent generator of offensive absurdities. Such as the above.
(And much of the problems of the IPCC came precisely because it operates on UN standard operating procedures.)
Lorenzo
Even better than Pink Floyd
Drawing distinctions between Iran and Saudi Arabia on women’s rights strikes me as backing Beelzebub in his coup against Satan, so in that sense I agree with Lorenzo. Maybe it is generational, but I notice a lot of people older than me have a sentimental attachment to the UN, even when it is clearly useless. I just want to get rid of it. I mean, seriously, this is worthy of Monty Python.
I’ll admit I’m no fan of the way the UN currently operates, a function of how it was set up, with the general assembly having about as much say as a “youth parliament” in canberra, and therefore being about as prone to grandstanding. And the security council isn’t that much better for law and order than a council of mafia dons or warlords and their lackies.
But… If democracy is a good thing, then something democratic above nation states is a good thing. The question is, how can it be made democratic, or at least more functional? Can you imagine our parliament if the members of a couple of seats had a veto over all acts?
So… it is patently desirable to improve gender equality in the two countries mentioned, and whether it’s Human Right, environment, whatever, then how are criteria defined to allow or disallow membership of the committee?
Now, are our senators on /our/ committees qualified? I guess many here (not I) would say “you cannot allow a green on an economics/finance committee”. How would you keep the Greens out of those bodies? are there any advantages of getting them in front of the paperwork that that committee sees?
SL
I wouldn’t be surprised if it is because those same people have a real memory of WWII. On that note, I have a lot of time for a UNSC. But a committee of women; another on plastic bags; another on education? No thank you. Too much like a takeover of liberal democracy by socialist world government.
db
The crucial part of “democracy/tic” is the “dem” part. The executives of nation states are not demes. Australia’s involvement in the UN process is an attack on Australian democracy, as it involves an extension of unaccountable executive discretionary power.
Probably not, actually, thanks to a complete unwillingness to learn (as had been evinced on various threads both here and elsewhere). I’m sure there are good environmental arguments to be made, but it seems the rest of us have to wade through a great deal of moral posturing first.
Now magnify that effect hundreds of times over for adherents of an imaginary sky fairy who are utterly convinced of their own moral rectitude.
I’m normally a comparative advantage type of gal, but one of the reasons why I’d like Western powers to be energy independent (ie, go nuclear) is so that the Middle East can be reduced to strategic irrelevance. Let them throw rocks at each other (that’s all they’ll be able to afford).
“you cannot allow a green on an economics/finance committee”.
And there are plenty of people who should not be on environmental committees. I still recall how the US authorities kept telling us that dioxin is safe. Go tell that to all the deformed Vietnamese children …. . Economists are one group who show little appreciation of biological processes. It probably explains why so many of them I’ve encountered loved “The Selfish Gene”, a hopelessly stupid way to think about molecular biology.
PP@15: on elected representation in the UN v current mouthpieces of the national executives.
Absolutely agreed, with direct election desirable in my view. I’d imagine other procedural reforms would stem from this. imagine if it were possible to get an election in a state that was run by bastards not quite strong enough to stop such a ballot. The representative(s) could be patriotic to the nation and the people, but against the particular regime of the day. Imagine a North Korean democratically elected rep saying – “invade us please and create a UN mandate like calling in the administrators for a broke company until a new democratic regime is in place”
And PP@14 seems to assume that a democatic government with world responsibility would inevitably be socialist. While I think that would be desriable, I do not think it inevitable in the medium term. I’d be interested in knowing why Peter thinks socialism is the unavoidable outcome – does he think that bit of Marx’s view of history is correct?
db
Step 1: Read Road To Serfdom.
The more decision-making you take away from individuals – particularly in the commercial sphere – the more the policy succumbs to learned helplessness; the more it can rely only on the state for aid….
db
No. There is no socio-political glue between individual human beings and a world government – and therefore no legitimacy – in the way there IS such glue between Australian citizens and the Australian government. I do not even WISH to be part of the same polity as Pakistan, Jordan, Chechnya, or any number of other societies thank you very much.
My God DB whatever you smoke, keep it away from the kids!
John H – I loved “The Selfish Gene”. What was the flaw in the book as you see it?
patrick, I just do not get this incredible romantic attachment leftists have to the UN. I think it must pull the same strings that “international socialism” once did.
I don’t want a democratically elected UN. If that were to happen they would lay claimed to legitimacy. Pretty soon they would pretend that they were more important than the nations they united. I used to think they served a useful purpose in providing a forum where nations can talk to eachother. But we now have alternatives like the G20. I’m with SL, I want the UN to wither and die.
PP@20:
Well, I’m with Diogenes of Sinope (“I am a citizen of the world, woof, woof”), but your views on the undesirability of a large polity do strike a chord in me when contemplating those thugby-dominated tribes north of the Murray…
But seriously: SL and others here are spot on in my view saying the UN has many dysfunctional aspects. As a toothless undemocratic gabfest platform, how could that not be the case? But bitching about hypocrites on committees is one thing: if they are toothless, then eiither ignore them, or try to reform them until you can trust them with teeth so there is a way of getting rid the stonings of women, and other noxious behaviours some states permit. Obviously economic sanctions aren’t going to hit oil-rich states in an oil-hungry world – so how do the anti-UN (reformed or not) types here suggest get women better treatment in those places? (and yes, on this, SL’s satan v beelebub is well put.)
Those stonings for alleged adultery, with often dubious “proof of guilt”, are murders allowed by a so-called sovereign state. Crimes against humanity? Maybe not. But /someone/ should be put in the dock for those deaths… How can the international community intervene? It’s hard enough for an internationlist lefty to think up ways to improve this, so ideas from those on the right here would be welcome.
Or do we just shrug our shoulders at the situation of the women in those states so correctly criticized in this regard by SL?
To say “this is stuffed – get rid of the UN” is like saying “the GFC is stuffed – get rid of the finance industry”. I /know/ you righties here are usually smart enough to figure out something from your own worldview that might work.
John H – I loved “The Selfish Gene”. What was the flaw in the book as you see it?
Yourself and a great many people loved it. I recall people carrying on about it when I was a young lad. So I read it and threw it across the room. The book puts forward a very misleading view of genetics and causes people to think in very bad frames. For example, did you know that the same gene in a different location will create a diffferent protein?
1. Behav Brain Sci. 1999 Oct;22(5):871-85; discussion 885-921.
Précis of “Lifelines: biology, freedom, determinism”.
Rose S.
There are many ways of describing and explaining the properties of living systems; causal, functional, and reductive accounts are necessary but no one account has primacy. The history of biology as a discipline has given excessive authority to reductionism, which collapses higher level accounts, such as social or behavioural ones, into molecular ones. Such reductionism becomes crudely ideological when applied to the human condition, with its claims for genes “for” everything from sexual orientation to compulsive shopping. The current enthusiasm for genetics and ultra-Darwinist accounts, with their selfish-gene metaphors for living processes, misunderstand both the phenomena of development and the interactive role that DNA and the fluid genome play in the cellular orchestra. DNA is not a blueprint, and the four dimensions of life (three of space, one of time) cannot be read off from its one-dimensional strand. Both developmental and evolutionary processes are more than merely instructive or selective; the organism constructs itself, a process known as autopoiesis, through a lifeline trajectory. Because organisms are thermodynamically open systems, living processes are homeodynamic, not homeostatic. The self-organising membrane-bound and energy-utilising metabolic web of the cell must have evolved prior to socalled naked replicators. Evolution is constrained by physics, chemistry, and structure; not all change is powered by natural selection, and not all phenotypes are adaptive. Finally, therefore, living processes are radically indeterminate; like all other living organisms, but to an even greater degree, we make our own
future, though in circumstances not of our own choosing.
PMID: 11301572 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
1. Biosystems. 2004 Jan;73(1):1-11.
What does a molecule want? The myth of the self-replicating molecule (comments on
the “selfish-gene” paradigm).
The non-equilibrium statistical mechanical autocatalytic theory, underlying the “selfish-gene” paradigm, is shown to be at several points insufficient and contradictory for the description of observed facts of biological systems. We analyze at some length these deficiencies as (1) statistical versus individual non-linear self-constraints, (2) the continuous versus discrete cause-effect evolutional transition, and (3) the nature of the emerging aim-directed biological systems. Concerning the latter, it is shown that it can only be described with reference to the origin of the genetic code, which cannot be accounted for by the continuous evolution of non-equilibrium statistical mechanical systems. We point out that these deficiencies might be covered by alternative (quantum) theoretical considerations. The theory of evolution according to which may have lead to aim-directedness in the primordeal times in a more consistent way, concerning both phenotype and genotype. The specific physical model adopted is an affine Hilbert spaces scheme, with a naturally emerging internal dynamics of measurement, monitored internally by (time-inversion) symmetry restoration. In this context, the physical relation of internal molecular symbolism (semiosis) and internal quantum mechanics is discussed.
PMID: 14729278 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
John H
I commented on your parietal lobe post OTR.
db
Your analogy is completely invalid.
1. The call to bin the UN is rational from first principles; no need to look at consequences.
2. The GFC was not ‘G’; it was purely a northern Atlantic phenomenon.
3. Volatility is a fact of humanity.
4. The finance industry has existed for millenia, and is a crucial institution for modern liberal civilization.
5. Unlike the UN, the case for the finance industry can be gloriously made from first principles.
6. With the kind of defences of the UN you are coming out with, I have never been more convinced that Australia should move first and start withdrawing from the UN, pending reform. The first move would be to withdraw from the Refugee Convention, and make our own policy. I promise. Others would soon follow.
John H
I commented on your parietal lobe post OTR.
Yep saw that thanks Peter. Dyscalculia certainly arises from inferior parietal and tends to have comobidities so caution required. Saw the strangest program on that one day, a maths professor with dyscalculia! Straight arithmetic operations might be parietal but more complicated maths procedures seem to invoke other areas, dorso laterals I think.
Thanks,
John.
The argument is not “we want to get women better treatment in those places”. The point is merely highlighting another instance of the UN’s contradictions beyond parody.
I am not interested in controlling foreign societies, so I feel no compunction to provide solutions to women being stoned in Iran. How could I say otherwise, without thus being obliged to “care” about 100 billion other things around the globe.
Basically, let them sort it out for themselves!
BTW Peter
I have some fun poking fun at intelligence testing on a recent post – The Business of Intelligence. You might enjoy it. Dig this, the twits are now claiming they can measure something called “practical intelligence”. Sheesh! When will these people intelligence testing bods realise they are trying to measure a fiction?
SL says:
“I’m sure there are good environmental arguments to be made, but it seems the rest of us have to wade through a great deal of moral posturing first.”
That’s doubly true for LIbertarian arguments- you need to pan through an awful lot of bull-dust and horse-shit and all you get for your efforts are a few pieces of Fool’s Gold
That’s doubly true for LIbertarian arguments- you need to pan through an awful lot of bull-dust and horse-shit and all you get for your efforts are a few pieces of Fool’s Gold
The complaint is irrelevant. We don’t have to put up with the moral posturing. We can learn it ourselves. The data is out there, you just have to read it.
Economics treats the environment as an externality. This is another strange feature of what is called economics. A discipline about resource allocation that ignores the very foundation which makes those resources available. That economists are taught to think of environmental issues as “externalities” is reason enough to treat any economist’s ideas on environmental matters with great caution.
Of course, It is important to note that this article comes almost a year to the day since a great man was unfairly oppressed for shining a light upon Saudi injustice.
Never forget
I think the book moves people from one way of framing things to a better way of framing things. Clearly the new frame is incomplete but for most people it’s still a vast improvement. IMHO
Your point about proteins doesn’t in my view challenge the framework offered by the book. It seemed clear to me that the description of what a gene is, as given in the book, was a parody. The book is not brilliant due to it’s articulation of what a gene is but because of it’s articulation of a mechanism by which Darwininan evolution, acting at the gene level (whatever that means in biochemical terms), can deliver outcomes that otherwise don’t seem Darwinian. That a given gene in a different position produces a different protein doesn’t take away from this point.
In any case Dawkins did a good job of qualifying what he meant by the term “gene” in the context of the book.
Economics treats lots of things as an externality. For instance technological innovation is treated as an externality in many contexts. I suspect that this is a big part of where Marxist economic thinking went wrong (ie it ignored incentives relating to risk). However the narrow focus that economics exhibits at times isn’t of itself wrong. Sometimes a narrow focus is important for revealing certain truths. A broad focus for revealing others.
The environment is external to what we think of as “the economy”. Just as the planets biosphere is generally treated as external when thinking about the workings of the human stomach. Of course human stomaches wouldn’t be around without the planets biosphere and the biosphere would be different if there were no human stomaches. However what we learn about stomaches whilst ignoring the planets biosphere is still very useful and relevant.
p.s. A lot of enviromental framing seems to regard humanity (including our stomaches) as an externality. Human society and human economies dramatically shape the environment and are shaped by the environment but human society, at least the modern industrial form, is often treated by environmentalists as negative externalities. We hear talk of “environmental flows” in the context of water management that imply that water flowing into our agricultural systems is not “natural”.
In any case the language is in part to blame. The term “environment”, even pre economics, is that which surrounds us. It is by definition deemed to be external.
DB, this has to end here. You CANNOT persist in thinking that the UN is a clusterfuck just because the poor downtrodden GA doesn’t have ‘real power’.
I know I should proceed by trying to persuade you not attack you, but frankly this is such an amazingly naive and even ludicrous view that I can’t even believe you hold it.
First, at the moment the representatives at the GA are basically civil servants. There is no reality in which they will not act in furtherance of the domestic agendas of their often corrupt and venal governments. Giving more power to the Organisation of Arab States would be just giving more power to repressive autocrats, that’s it. The teachable moment would be for you, DB, not them.
You suggest elections to fix this. Talk about repainting while the foundations collapse!! Half of these countries don’t have decent elections at all, what point could there be in asking them to rig another one?
The problem is not the organisation, it is the members. The only structural problem is that the US is stupid enough to pay for the thing.
In Dave’s defence, I have to say that I always had an idea of the UN as the upholder of human rights etc etc. I always thought it was a good idea. And arguments that certain states shouldn’t have input seemed to me akin to arguments that certain people shouldn’t be allowed to vote because we didn’t like their views.
Then I did International Law at uni. I’m afraid that it ruined International Law for me, and my view of the UN. No one does anything that International Law says! They ignore Security Council resolutions and ICJ judgments. The UN is too hamstrung to stop genocide or various other injustices. Half the countries are pushing their own corrupt agendas and don’t give a damn about human rights. Stupid alphabetical rota systems means ridiculous countries head up committees.
I don’t know what the answer is. Like Dave I’d really like the idea of international body, but like Patrick, I think some of these polities need to be reformed first so that they are genuinely democratic.
Patrick@30: I’m having trouble reading anything in your statement but a FOAD. I think fMRIs of our frontal lobes would show marked differences in “empathy circuits” and we’d both be happy with our own results.
LE@39: You seem to express a similar view of a universal system for basic justices together with current poor implementation. Thanks for picking up both my hopes for, and criticisms of, an international body like a UN (whether version 1.0, 2.1 or 52.5).
We know that a large disparate polity can operate under a single legal system, (e.g. Rome), and I cannot conceive that globalization will not provide an analogous large polity again by the end of the millenium.
There are immense difficulties creating a body LE would like to see in parallel to the existing UN’s flawed structure – so evolutionary reform seems necessary.
My personal view is that a final synthesis of law and political representation will be almost totally based on the synthesis of western systems, as these seem already mature with pretty good architecture, and that nation states, particularly when drawn artificially (like many under former colonial powers) make as little sense as city states in C21.
So, how would LE as temporary world dictator, have an international representative body work? Representation based on existing nations or on a non-gerrymandered algorithm? What powers against individuals should be arrogated first, with powers to draw before court and impose penalties – otherwise unprosecuted deaths or commercial contracts? I might surprise some here by saying I suspect tax agencies might lead the way, allocating taxes between nation states from havens and on transnational conglomerates, with distribution reflecting initially where true earnings occur (not need), and then later the possibility of sanctions for outrageous tratment of citizens (like those unjust stonings that are so gender biased and hypocritical) by withholding tax proceeds to those states.
How else could trans-national crimes and negligence (think BP in the gulf of mexico, chernobyl exploding over half of europe, bhopal, or release of a dirty bomb in a small state affecting all other surrounding states) be processed in a consistent manner but by something that transcends nation states as much as transnational corporates do, and with just as much capacity to affect multitudes for good or ill?
What, Dave posits that the dollar and commercial arrangements along the capitalist paradigm might improve human conditions?!? Must go and buy a thermometer.
My understanding is the economics treats solar physics as an externality too!
JH@17 I have never read “The Selfish Gene”. I have never been able to get past the obvious philosophical absurdity of the title (only things with intentions can be selfish: worse, central to natural selection is non-intentional selection mechanisms). But thanks for providing biologically informative reasons to ignore it.
One of my bugbears is people who cannot tell the difference between ‘genetic’ and ‘congenital’. (It turns up a lot in discussions of causes of diversity in human sexuality, for example.) Genes are (at best) a recipe, not a mould. Hence average heights going up and down depending on how many generations of good/bad nutrition one comes from.
JH@33 What T said about externalities and analytical focus. It is a perennial difficulty. What the Club of Rome had to say about resources and resource-depletion was mostly crap precisely because they had no economics, or economic history, involved.
Economists forever wrestle with the exogenous/endogenous issue. (An ‘externality’ is not the same issue: it is an effect whose costs or benefits are not internalised by economic agents — most environmental degradation is the result of externalities.)
Not that biology and economics are necessarily all that far apart. An economist I worked with for a while found that when he explained firm behaviour as niche-seeking, biologists “got it” very quickly. One can think of firms as displaying Lamarckian selection processes
As for “punctuated equilibrium”, I find that thinking in terms of budget constraints helps thinking about extinction events and the explosion in species diversity afterwards. Specifically, the budget constraints get massively tightened in the extinction event — so most species die — then massively loosened with all the spare resources afterwards, so far more “experiments in living” become possible. As niches get filled up, budget constraints stabilise to a fairly low rate of species turnover.
Me, a temporary world dictator? What a scary thought!
Part of the problem of the UN is that people don’t like being told by outsiders what to do. It’s related to that post of SL’s about vile customs: sometimes, people prefer to be be misgoverned by their own than well-governed by outsiders. But the UN at the moment is not even capable of good governance, IMHO – it’s the worst option – being misgoverned by outsiders. It’s full of bureaucracy of the worst sort.
The UN is also riven by the tension which inflicts much of the Left – do we allow culturally relative practices, or do we say that certain things are Not Good? I myself am not sure about this – there are certain things I think are Not Good – but forcing people not to do them doesn’t always work.
I wonder if Public International Law could take guidance from International Trade Law to work better. Strangely enough, although I’m no expert, it seems International Trade Law is far more functional. I think this is partly pragmatism – people want to be able to rely on contracts they’ve entered into – people want things to work – people want their money. People get arbitrators to resolve disputes. Money is a very good incentive to get people to work together. So I’m not surprised, Dave.
I am a big believer in development as a way of establishing human rights and environmental improvements. If you take away people’s hunger and make sure that they are healthy and well-fed, then they can start thinking about treating other people and the environment well. Of course, I’d want the development to be carefully crafted, and to learn from the mistakes that the West made in the last 200 years. For example, we don’t want to destroy the environment in the process and we don’t want workers dying in hideous conditions. Have you read Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist? SL recommended it to me. It’s got great chapters on (a) inappropriate development policies in third world countries and (b) how domestic corruption means Cameroon can’t develop despite its abundant resources.
DB240 If you want to feel better about your conclusion, think coordination problems. I believe that the US federal government should do less, not because it automatically a bad idea for government to do x or y, but because there are quite a few public policy issues that trying to centrally coordinate for a country of 300 million people across a wide range of natural and other environments is just Too Big An Ask.
(I gather Singapore has a good health system. What works for a city-state of 5 million is not necessarily upwardly scaleable, however. The NHS is, however, a bad idea at any level.)
President Obama is a travelled, highly educated, well-read, very intelligent guy who fairly (and increasingly painfully) clearly does not understand significant slabs of his own country. Said slabs have noticed and have voted accordingly, his Party getting a result that was worse than what the Republicans suffered in the Watergate election(!).
That should be DB@40 and “Consider, for example, “punctuated equilibrium”.”
db
Whoah! I don’t think you realize what you’re aligning yourself with here.
1. The Roman empire was a proto-fascist empire, requiring its citizen-subjects to worship the state religion. For consequences of not so obeying see the early Christians.
2. The “disparate polity” was a consequence of successive military invasions, consolidated by permanent troops on the ground.
3. Both Nazism and International Communism attempted to emulate Rome. Fortunately, they were both defeated. Liberal democracy one. Now, we know that liberalism/nation-state are the international socialists bete-noire.
4. The UN was established as a bulwark precisely against the Roman empire. The UN Charter’s first principle is the integrity of national sovereignty. To that extent it is but an updated Treaty of Westphalia.
4. The 2nd foundational principle of the UN is – far from world government – “self determination”.
5. The trend since WWII has been the opposite of a centripetal world government. In 1946 there were 50 members of the UNGA. Today there are 192!
DB@40 The polity most based on emulation of (some) Roman models is, of course, the US — hence its official architecture. It is already the hegemonic manager of the world system: perhaps we should apply to become States of the US
(As for expanding the Chinese model, ask the Tibetans and Uighurs what they think of that one.)
European history since 476 has been all about attempts to recapture “the glory that was Rome” and them either falling apart (Big Karl’s empire) or being bitterly opposed — the Habsburgs, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Hitler (the persistent eagle fetish is a bit of a give-away) … Indeed, European civilisation conquered the globe precisely because it was never united, so got the benefits of competitive jurisdictions.
How the EU attempt to recapture the glory that was Rome is going to go is a fascinating question. As I point out at the end of this post, the degree to which it represents genuine “new thinking” is much more moot than people tend to realise.
PP@46: I wasn’t aligning myself to the Roman political system (although tolerance of different cultures was good), merely saying that there was a large disparate polity that kindof got along (or were forced to), apart from the Judean People’s Front screaming “apart from roads, laws, peace, water, …”
Proto-fascist? Giggling about the lictors!
(And on Xtians, the failure to say “God Bless King/Queen/Australia/America”, see the letters beetween Pliny the Younger and Trajan on the rumors not only of insurrection, but celebrations about sacrifice, babies, blood and flesh in bread every feast… That sort of thing was a big NOT ON for the likes of Trajan, who advised to forgive and not punish as long as the individual hadn’t eaten babies and said “god save the emperor”. SL’s upcoming book, or at least the untrimmed version, addresses similar conflicts, and an alternate history dealing with the troublesome xtians during the century of good emperors would be useful. A hegemony that treats people equally and enforces just – at least for the day – laws fairly is a Good Thing. The Romans didn’t do a bad job of balancing leaving foreign cultures alone versus enforcing the basics of civilized behaviour. Not an A+ of course, but C- at least.)
LE@43: on development/well-fed populations: yeah, I’d like to think so, but it’s hard with rich states like Saudi, Iran is well-fed but still has the stonings. On corruption rendering aid ineffective, yes. A recent paper analysing introduction of vaccines developed a governance index that it suggests could be used by philanthropic organizations to get best bang for buck (here)
Perhaps a similar index could justify even forced regime change (as the greatest of graded responses, perhaps even by targetted assassination – subcontracted to Mossad – after in absentia trial of a “Dear Leader”) – a “get this score, and…” threat rather than using rights as a pretext for inconsistent action that has a completely different agenda. Such an index would make things less arbitrary, although the sanctions would /also/ have to be well governed (hmmm… AWB… We aren’t lilywhite)
In my view, people have rights – and stuff Westphalia, but states have no right to act as they please when they act against the basic rights of their citizens.
At least the UN is better than what would have been in place had the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 been honored!
db
Don’t worry, I am quite up on Trajan and Pliny the Younger’s letters. Curiously you omitted Cicero.
The point was not about Christianity. It was about the jackboot of a state religion, whether it be the Julio-Claudians, or UN committees.. You also need to look at Augustus, who made Queen Victoria look like La Cicciolina!!
Iran and Saudi Arabia, countries that systematically violate women’s rights,
HAHAHAHAHAHA
It’s funny even tho’ it’s true.
But the UN has its own problem with its “upper house”, the security council. Get rid of that, and make UN General Assembly a bit more like a normal representative chamber, without the artificial demarcation lines for voting for such bodies, and there might be a chance.
That’s the problem Dave, it can’t happen at this point in history.
First. the UN is essentially a Westphalian association between great powers. The Americans and the Japanese foot most of the expenses. The UNSC is an institutional stalemate enjoyed by the 5 major victors of WWII. It is what makes it in their interests to support this… well, influence on their sovereignty.
The General Assembly’s problem is that you can’t really have a representative system. First different nations have different population levels. Australia and Indonesia each have a seat yet Indonesia has far more people. Should we give Indonesia representation proportional to its population? Won’t that be an incentive to larger populations and somewhat unwise in this era of sustainability concerns?
Or we could just divide the world into seats as with parliament. But that would create problems too. Say Croatia and Serbia share a seat? And then there’s the problem of liberal democratic governance and the culture that supports it, lack thereof.
The only thing you can say for the UN is that its marginally more useful than the League of Nations. In my view a large global conflict will come along and scrap it consequence of UNSC members having a blue. And then we’ll probably get Mk III.
I can wait. I already have three layers of government. Enough already.
Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing necessarily wrong with state religion. For example, it has served the English very well. OTOH, it was a disaster for Spain.
This is an argument against the UN and world government. Your point is premised on the State being exogenous to its citizens. This is a highly identifying tic of leftist thought, where socialism is always imposed from above. The difference with liberal democratic nation states, such as the US, Australia, England, and so on, is that the State evolved from below. The reason England has a state religion is because the people rose up and booted out a foreign power – Roman Catholicism and the Vatican. Any power the State has was given to it by the people. See, for example, the constantly accountable plenary powers of our State parliaments, and the most people-inspired and supported creation of state power up until 1900, and arguably beyond; the Australian Constitution.
The whole pro-UN/world government mindset is an instance of the love affair with Big Daddy top-down authoritarian social engineering which animates the leftist imagination.
Example A.
Wow. Just wow. State Good. Citizens Bad. Cleanse the polity of citizens, so that the imposed rule of the imperialist invader can be trouble free.
You should be very careful. At least 20% of the globe’s population believes in your quote above. Their source of ‘hegemonic fairness’ is a Book written in the 8th century of oral history which spread from 6th Arabia. You might not like the particular twist of who is ‘troublesome’.
One can think of firms as displaying Lamarckian selection processes
So does biology. Ted Steele has been vindicated. Larmarkian inheritance does exists. Suck on that neodarwinians. The emerging stream of epigenetics will overturn many models of genetics and evolution, it has huge implications for human health(obesity can be inherited from fat parents! – possibly), and is revealing the nature-nurture dichotomy for the nonsense it always was.
Punctuated equilibrium – creative destruction.
Note in the inherent bias in “equilibrium”. There is no equilibrium! Biology abhors stillness.
There is one very good reason for a UN. And that is a permanent diplomatic forum whose design is to minimize catastrophic conflict. The rest is just illegitimate provider capture.
I guess, DB, I actually wish the UN would just foad. So it is perhaps not surprising.
Others have identified lots of problems with your thinking. The most fundamental remains how delusional it is.
An actually powerful and representative UN would not protect western capitalist liberal rights. It would protect Chinese and Indian collectivist rights, mainly against us.
Even if wasn’t representative and stayed with 1 country 1 vote like now, if you gave it actual power and scrapped the sanity veto of the UNSC you would end up with UNGA-mandated anti-semitism and anti-religious-defamation ‘laws’, as a first and urgent priority.
To spell it out: Iran wouldn’t stop stoning women, but you would get locked up for criticising them.
As for your earlier question about right-wing ways to enforce fundamental human rights, we tried a couple ideas, and you hated them. See Iraq.
I agree with Peter Patton @54. I think whilst ever the UN members continue to row around in circles, we are safe. I would hate to think of what sort of calamity it might take to get them all rowing purposefully in one direction; if it ever comes to that, then I suspect we would all be doomed anyway.
And as for democratically electing representatives, democracy as now practised is far too important to be handed to “the people” to decide. What would happen in countries like the US or Australia if ever the ruling elites actually let the people elect their representatives, instead of party-chosen hacks and favourites? Utter chaos.
But buried in LE’s first speech as ruler of the world @43 is the quite sensible observation that international trade seems to work ok, once each party sees there is something in it for them. Maybe we need a trade-ocracy?
What would happen in countries like the US or Australia if ever the ruling elites actually let the people elect their representatives, instead of party-chosen hacks and favourites? Utter chaos.
I don’t agree.
There’s a profession of politics built around control of population and its perceptions. This is orchestrated by allies in the media like Philip Adams and Andrew Bolt. But the choice is still up to us. Certain seats in Australia chose independents and delivered the country a minority govt. I think that says a lot about people v technocracy in the early 21st century.
Second there’s a kind of natural self-organization that develop amongst literate populations in the modern world. It’s quite conceivable that Australia could run on people power if the jurisdictions handed to State governments were instead gifted to local councils. And some federal powers too.
Therefore laws governing, for example, drug use would depend on the suburb you lived in. In Fitzroy Nth you can walk down the street smoking a spliff but cross the line into Clifton Hill and you’re a criminal etc.
This could also go for gay marriage. In Dubbo poufs who’re married in St Kilda aren’t married. These places that fail to recognize gay marriage can suffer the economic consequences.
Tax levies on the population for welfare purposes could be in whole or in part taken from the locals. In this situation those on the dole would be aware that they’re being supported by their communities not some large abstraction like the federal govt. In suburbs where there’s no need for the dole, it doesn’t exist. Other suburbs where there is a great deal of such need can better collectivize their resources and monitor misallocation of this resource on things like drink. Again, you know these people.
The Federal government would retain control of aspects of policy that govern relations between our country and others. And oversee the country with federal police that assist council police when the crime warrants it.
Just a brain fart o’ course.
There is no doubt a case for greater participatory democracy in Australia. I, for one, support High Court rulings in appellate matters to be subject to citizen-generated referendum, as well as any legislation passed by Parliament.
Adrien
Strange reference to “natural self-organisation”. If current Russia is an example of how natural self-organisation evolves over time then it would appear that nature really is red in tooth and claw. Perhaps you were having a little dig at that religious notion of “spontaneous order”?
Thanks Patrick. I hesitated to take up further space setting out a vision of utter chaos. But you have done it very well. I’m assuming each community division would have sort of “wardens” to make sure each man/woman did his/her bit?
Patrick – I apologise for taking your name. My comment @60 was directed to Adrien@57.
All of which is off the point of SL’s post. I wish somehow this religious/regime imposed treatment of women could be removed from existence. But I don’t have the power.
A few have mentioned cantonment-like systems, which may have some value (gay marriage in one suburb not another in adrien@51 is problematic given mobility and central administration of estates, next-of-kin transactions and privileges, etc), although the civilized world shows some problems, such as the lengths women have to go through for birth control in Ireland (at least until recently, maybe even now), and trivially, you can bet wearing a black/white striped jumper would be a capital offence within at least 25km of Kardinia Park – ok maybe not capital, but still treated as a felony. (Hell… Logical extension… Parterfamilias in it’s worst form).
Adrien@51 makes some very good points on practical difficulties of change.
I’d note that /any/ international organization, where nation states, not people, are in the driver seat, have exactly the same problems as the UN generally.
That huge debtor, the US, having a big say in the IMF and WB must surely raise eyebrows. It’ll be interesting to see how it’s dominance here can be maintained with the debt owed by the US nation and citizens, if as a whole, Americans cannot generate income on a sustainable basis (current accounts being more important than government budget balance here).
Could having a massive debtor on international non-UN finance and trade bodies, bodies with some executive power, be that much different from having Iran and Saudi on a women’s rights committee? (OK stonings are worse than unpaid debts in my view, but I suspect I might again be in a minority).
DB, come on! To pick just one example, the US has a disproportionately SMALL say in the IMF given that, again, it pays for the bloody thing!
A few things on the UN/EU/Rome/large central government thingy, derived in part from Boris Johnson’s excellent book on the topic:
1. Ancient Rome was not fascist. Lots of states that copied it were fascist, but not Rome itself. If anything, ancient Rome was under-policed, not over-policed. It was not Sparta (which was, I think, fascist in the proper sense). It was, however, authoritarian. Think Singapore rather than Nazi Germany. Definitely not liberal, however, except in matters of religion and private choice.
2. Pre-Christian Rome was the last Western civilisation before modernity that could not assume consensus on moral matters, and could not assume that morality translated neatly into law. Funnily enough this point came up in my conversion course yesterday, and I think it’s a very telling one. The Romans stopped human sacrifice in Gaul/Britain and Carthage, stopped Jews stoning women for adultery and stoning apostates for apostacy, and did their level best to stop the creation of and trade in eunuchs. They also got rid of FGM and had a good go (at least under Hadrian) at stopping Jewish infant circumcision. And that’s about it. When Romanisation happened it was because citizenship was like a bloody ‘green card’, conferring huge privileges (in both law and on the employment front) and was generally a massive leg up to get on in life, and also because Greek and Latin were the languages of trade and commerce.
3. We would probably not want to live in a society that imposed so little of its law on its subjects. Lots of truly atrocious practices (including practices that the Romans themselves thought atrocious) were left untouched, purely because they didn’t involve loss of life or interference with anyone’s sexy bits (of some concern to the Romans, go figure). This meant, for example, that brothers and sisters routinely married each other in Egypt, for example, that whole religious groups engaged in temple prostitution, that certain classes of male priests voluntarily emasculated themselves. In public. Before an audience. Etc etc. And I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of TEH ROMAN EMPIRE WEIRD. Read Robin Lane Fox’s Pagans & Christians. He has an entire chapter on TEH ROMAN EMPIRE WEIRD. It is, as they say, instructive. Show Shariah law to a Roman jurist and he’d go ‘well, I don’t like it, but as long as you don’t go around executing anyone, you can have the rest of it’. Okay, you might say, that gets rid of the stonings and beheadings, but it doesn’t change the mass of Islamic rules with regard to private law (eg inheritance and marriage) or finance (eg usury).
4. While we moderns may have lost the Christian moral consensus when it comes to the making of laws, we do still have a liberal consensus, a liberal consensus that is struggling mightily with something else — I’m not sure what you’d call it — that wants to let ethnic and cultural groups live by their own laws. The latter is actually closer to the Roman model than the former. So far the liberal consensus (in various forms) is winning. The French have laïcité, there is no Shariah law in Britain, there is a ‘forced marriage task force’ in the UK police etc.
5. It is this last point (apart from all the other excellent points that people have raised upthread, and which I won’t repeat) that tells against large, supra-national entities. The EU worked wonderfully well when it was simply about trade (LE’s point), but once it became about a great deal more — ‘harmonization’ and common currency and centralised administration, huge structural flaws have been exposed. And this in a part of the world that (a) has a common Christian heritage (b) has had generations of Kings and Emperors try to copy the Roman model and (c) was actually united under Roman rule for hundreds of years. Even in Europe: rich, western, sharing a bank of common traditions, obtaining ‘liberal agreement’ is nigh on impossible.
In short, it won’t work. The EU only sort of works, emphasis on the ‘sort of’. Anything larger is doomed to fail.
SL
What you say is true. And of course, I was committing some version of the historian’s fallacy by retrojecting an early 20th century political phenomenon – fascism – back on to Rome.
My only point was to warn db that while the Roman imperial example might well bolster the case for some form of world government, there are many strands to the Roman imperial example, and he should be cognizant of some of those strands, which he might not find so pleasing should they manifest in a 21st century UN-style world government.
[ADMIN: Historians aside, I'm pretty satisfied that Sparta was fascist. Yes, they wouldn't have called themselves that, but I'm more interested in 'if the cap fits...']
SL/LE
I am not a lawyer, so can only go so far on this topic, but I find the relative success of private international law – international trade/economic law – over public international law to be fascinating. How much do you think it comes down to law’s fundamental roots in property ownership and exchange.
How accurate is my take that the ultimately, most of the law is about the Property, stupid!? If this is correct, there is something deeply ironic about Property Law’s reputation as being dry as.
Come to think about it, a person who decided to pursue a scholarly career as an historian of property law, would probably make a cracker of an historian full stop. By understanding a society’s laws of property creation, acquisition, and exchange must surely take you into every corner of that society.
That’s called judging a book by it’s cover. We all do it so don’t feel bad. Having said that your philosophical objection isn’t one Richard Dawkins would object to. It is in fact pretty much the first point he makes in the book.
Oh PP @ 66, music unto my ears. Personally I think contract, property, tort and unjust enrichment law are incredibly important. These are the things which make our world hang together. Contract law is about promoting voluntary exchange, but it is also about promoting predictability, stability, etc. Property law is what gives some people more (or less) power in this world. It is also incredibly important. When you say, “This is mine” you have rights as against the rest of the world. I’m afraid I rant at my classes about how important this is.
TP@67 I believe you meant me @42. And i wasn’t judging it by its cover, but by its title.
I title you have to disavow as your first point is a bloody stupid title. Besides, it is the title that got into the popular culture, with all sorts of invidious effects.
JH@53 Creative destruction and punctuated equilibrium are not really very analogous concepts. The former is about making new resources available and superseding old processes, the latter about sudden, massive shifts in biodiversity. Creative destruction is more like what happens in the ordinary course of biological events.
The equilibrium concept in economics is somewhat similar to the thinking behind inertia in physics: a state things head towards, without necessarily ever being reached.
Biology also abhors a category.
LE
I bet you must get very high ratings from those end of course student surveys. I can imagine the comments: “Man, this teacher made property law interesting. Give her the Nobel Peace prize”!
I understand why he chose that title. Perhaps it was useful early in thr life of the book for creating some shock value and hence publicity. However with the benefit of hindsight I agree that it is a bloody stupid title. And I agree that the title has got into the popular culture more so than the content of the book. However I do still think it is a valuable book in terms of reframing the simplisitic view of survivalism that the lay person attributes to evolution. I would suggest that people ignore the title and read the book anyway.
What does this mean? Is it different to theft?
Oh no! That’s a thread-ender from Terje if ever there was one! Everyone duck from the unleashed LE!!
Terge, it means you got more than you bargained for. Or, as Patrick says, just hang about for a demonstration.
Should I prepare popcorn?
Tee hee, no reason to duck, anyone.
Unjust enrichment is the idea that sometimes people take money (or services or goods) at the expense of another in circumstances that it is unjust that they retain the benefit they have received. Imagine, for example, that you think it is my birthday tomorrow, and you give me $100. However, you discover that you were mistaken and it is not my birthday. I would be unjustly enriched at your expense if I were to retain the $100, and I should pay it back to you.
So yeah, it’s different from theft because it’s not criminal law, it’s civil law. But it’s a way of getting unjust payments back. Quite useful if you are not sure whether you should pay something or not, and you later find out that there was not a reason to pay that money.
It’s controversial because it’s a relatively recent development in the law (primarily driven by academics rather than by the courts). The current High Court of Australia hates it because they regard it as usurping the role of Equity.
Okay, I’ll stop there — I don’t think you want to hear about typical defences to the claim, or the war between those who believe there should be “unjust factors” and those who believe there should be an “absence of basis”.
oh yea, and a lot of beer, especially if I mention that unjust enrichment is just equity for the mentally lazy…or ‘top-down’ equity
Just on The Selfish Gene, may I say that despite the stupid title (quite likely chosen by the publisher, if Dawkins’ comments in the introduction are anything to go by), it is a very good and thought-provoking book, and sets out evolutionary theory with real elegance and elan, helped by a knowledge of mathematics and game theory. I know Dawkins can get people’s backs up, and I can see why, but his science writing is genuinely outstanding and very, very well constructed.
On Unjust Enrichment: It’s also a Roman law rather than common law concept, so importing it into our law is new, although it’s not new in any civilian system. For a range of historical reasons, the Romans never developed a separate equitable jurisdiction, mainly because they had a major reform of pleadings, drafting and procedure in the 2nd century BC, which meant that many of the procedural and justice problems they had with their courts resolved themselves.
In late medieval England, by contrast, people with strong cases at common law were losing on technical points of pleading, and so approached the King/Lord Chancellor for redress. Equity emerged as a separate jurisdiction thereafter. The ‘mischief’ that equity looked to undo was very much to do with ossified legal procedure and patently unjust outcomes. Of course, equity in its turn became ossified, hence Dickens’ satire of the Court of Chancery in Bleak House and the 1875 Judicature Acts. These acts ended the separate administration of the law, but did not ‘fuse’ equity and common law. The underlying principles and remedies are still different.
The effect of this is that remedies common lawyers would associate with equity are built into the interstices of Roman law systems in a way that we find quite foreign. I’m having to deal with it now in Scots law, and there are times when I do feel like someone has unscrewed the top of my skull and is fiddling with malicious intent with my wiring.
I wouldn’t think you should have to give it back. I think that such an idea would open a can of worms. If you had deliberately and falsely lead me to believe it was your birthday then I’d likely just end the friendship but I wouldn’t want a legal remedy to exist. Perhaps there are better examples but this one does not convince at all.
Trade is at the centre of commerce. Gift giving (in goods and services) is at the centre of community building. I think we do a huge disservice to the later process if we import the formalism of the first. Certainly if in the process a door is opened and the legal profession waltzed in.
Gifts may be given with all manner of expectation. However they are gifts.
p.s. If somebody does work for my business and invoices me twice and through error I pay twice then in this situation I would expect the money back and I’d expect a legal remedy if it didn’t happen. Maybe this is a better example but I would have thought that this was already covered.
There are a couple of issues expressed by some commenters that show a narrower view than I’d hoped.
1) The issue about population-based votes v nation states is not so simple: independence and splitting of nations is encouraged by the current system, and would be further increased by more localized cantonment-like systems apparently advocated by some here. Population increase will be prevented by more natural means relating to carrying capacity.
2) The problem of too many layers of service providers is real, found in any federation, but amenable, for any particular regulatory and executive service, to rationalization.
3) A global layer of government should actually be welcomed by competitive advantage types, as nation states have a tendency to erect barriers that can be arbitrary or driven by unrepresentative privileged groups within a nation state. Removal this capability from nations world-wide would present the same advantages as federation in Oz which removed the need for anything like GATT administration.
4) To give one example of how global regulations might be easier to administer than in the EU, we could look at safety tolerance standards of goods such as food and electrical appliances: a global regulatory regime could not practically apply the /same/ standard universally, but /could/ demand accurate labelling of the tolerance levels, and allow choice by individuals about what they buy (rather than nation states defining what can be purchased) with suppliers satisfying the local demands for the relative volume of goods with different safety levels. The EU, already so close to harmony, could not take this approach.
5) A properly constitued government can minimize functional overlap and creep of administrative agencies, such as might arise between GATT (trade) and BASEL (financial probity), as well as avoid the bastardization of actions of administrative agencies by individual nations states for political purposes unrelated to the natural purpose of the agency.
6) You could argue that many rules currently implemented locally should be administered globally. Even tenancy regulations, traditionally local, are problematic when the landlord is in another nation. With global commerce, the problems of “flags of convenience” become evident in everything, not just shipping.
Bottom line: anti-world regulation by a co-ordinated democratic government with properly delineated agencies aren’t seeing the opportunities for freedoms and rationalizations they desire so much.
Terje @ 81 – Yes – you can get the money back using something called “an action for money had and received”. Equity lawyers would just leave it there.
A difficulty may come when the recipient of the money goes insolvent.
Consider the following case, Chase Manhattan v Israel British Bank. Chase Manhattan was under an obligation to transfer £2M to Israel British Bank. However an employee made a mistake and did the transaction twice over (transferring £4M). Before Chase Manhattan could discover its mistake and demand the money back, Israel British Bank went insolvent. The action for money had and received is a personal remedy only, therefore Chase Manhattan would just be another creditor in the insolvency, and the extra £2M would be available for distribution for creditors. In the event, Goulding J found that there was a fiduciary duty on the part of Israel British Bank to return the money and that the money was impressed with a trust relationship, which gave Chase Manhattan a proprietary interest in the money. This meant the money wasn’t available for distribution for creditors and Chase Manhattan got all its £2M back. Still, the reasoning is somewhat suspect, and Goulding J is really using the trust in an instrumental fashion (to achieve a particular result), not a principled fashion.
Do you wonder how that poor employee was treated once the mistake was found? I do. I also wonder how much longer he lasted in the job!
Needless to say I thought that the reasoning in Chase Manhattan was very sloppy. I don’t think the same answer would have obtained in Australia, at least not prior to the decision itself. I can’t see Heydon J finding a fiduciary relationship there
I don’t think the insolvency case is a big issue whichever way you rule it. Obviously of concern to the specific companies involved but not that material to the overall body of law.
Dave – I’d tolerate tariffs between the Australian states and even a different rail gauge if it meant we could abolish the federal government. The federal govenment through the income tax regime imposes a massive barrier to trade between every Australian household. They are a menace.
We do not need a world government to achieve the key global initiatives. We essentially had a common global currency (gold) for the entire 1800s with no world government. We can dismantle trade barriers unilaterally. And we already have international law. Even the UN represents far too much world government and should be trimmed.
DB, you are confusing me again!!
I thought efficiency and centralisation were the classic ideals of fascist/socialists and other dis/utopian delusionists fustrated with the plodding masses.
Conservatives and liberals alike value the inefficiency arising from competition and decentralisation.
John H – Strange reference to “natural self-organisation”. If current Russia is an example of how natural self-organisation evolves over time then it would appear that nature really is red in tooth and claw.
The reference wasn’t to the Soviet Union but to Hungary in the weeks following the (eventually) crushed revolt against the Russians:
Full quote here.
I’m sure Arendt’s thesis is disputed. But it makes sense to me.
Patrick @ 84, I don’t like Chase Manhattan either. You can’t just make up a trust relationship because you feel like it.
Terje @ 85, actually the insolvency implications of these cases are incredibly important. People fight to establish trusts so that they can get all their money out of a collapse. It’s not just of interest to the individual parties, but to how we organise our commercial arrangements and what the ramifications of handing over money in certain circumstances are.
Dave #82 – I can think of reasons why comparative advantage types might object to global governance; would tax havens persist under one-world government? I think not.
But its a moot point. In order for world government to, to use your example, enforce accurate labeling, it would require the authority to over-ride any nation-state that refuses to comply. How? What nation -state would allow this?
Again the problem of representation and composition arises. Any world government has to be constituted somehow. Democratic elections re problematic because of this different size of national populations. The larger you are the more say you have. So the larger countries will dominate, and if history’s any guide, will rig the law in their own interests. Those disadvantaged by this practice will object and deny the world government sovereignty and so forth. The nation-state is a recent artificial construction that still struggles with this problem of sovereignty (pick anywhere in Africa) the human race does not possess enough cultural and moral homegeny to provide support for it, and the idea that there’s one over-arching political apparatus from which we’ll no longer be able to escape is frightening to many of us including myself.
I think the Earth will probably end up under one state eventually but it’s while off yet. There’s simply not enough support for it. It’s slow process. The UN is 90% useless but one thing it does do is make it impossible for the events that led to WWI to repeat themselves. That’s about it.
LE – I think insolvency law is important for the reason you outline. However I don’t think anybody is going to choose a structure on the basis of what happens if somebody accidentally pays them twice.
The real point here TP is that no-one did so choose, but that Peter Gibson J made it happen to them anyway. Thus introducing uncertainty where previously there was none – I am sure you can see the implications of this!
I dunno if this is a bit whacky, but I think the only thing which will make us unite into one world government would be finding life out there on another planet. People unite against the Other. At the moment, that’s people with different traditions and looks, but if we found something Other-ish enough, I’m sure we’d notice our similarities quick smart.
Terje @ 91 – too late already. Plenty of lawyers advocate a particular approach – but there’s not enough of a consensus to state with any certainty what the law is. It’s a bit of a mess, frankly. One day, I’m a gonna sort it out.
LE – I wasn’t talking about the choices the legal profession may make regarding the resolution of this issue. I was saying that nobody is going to set up a structure of trusts and companies to ensure that if a customer accidentally double pays they can make off with the money. The structures people put in place will be driven by other case law associated with tax and solvency as well as other issues. As such how the legal profession rules on accidental double payments in solvency cases does not have any significant implications for how people structure their affairs.
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