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Comment by thomassmith65 | Hacker News Reader

  what would be the global policy on abortion?

Probably none. I agree with the author that we need world government, but it would be stupid to have the highest level of government stipulate all laws for every nation, state, province, county, town and village beneath it.

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One could say that about the Americans but they do it almost compulsively, and completely ignore levels of government where nearly everything actually happens. Many current American problems are locally managed including housing and real estate but so much energy goes to the President, partly because he -pertains to- so many people. Many people are explicit that whatever is on their minds must be done “nationally”. What’s to stop this pattern from repeating at a greater scale?

  What’s to stop this pattern from repeating at a greater scale?

A well-designed constitution would be a start.

Not that there is an air-tight guarantee that a government won't turn bad. But we currently have over a half dozen governments with nuclear weapons. On the whole, I'd rather just worry about one.

One you can’t leave

Yes, that's the proposition: potential bad government instead of potential extinction.

No thanks. Easy. Bad government is a predictable outcome. Extinction risk is wildly overrated and doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

I'd be uncomfortable emphatically staking a position on the whether a global government would go bad. There are many factors aside from ideology that determine if a government functions well; if someone tells me "I'm forming a new liberal democracy" it is too little information to predict if it will be a good one, or a bad one.

People do overestimate the risk that a nuclear war would lead to human extinction. Unfortunately, people also overestimate, gravely, the capacity of humanity to refrain from nuclear war. It has been less than a century since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we've come close to a nuclear conflict on several occasions.

“I’m forming a new government, and everyone is subject to it and you can’t leave,” is a heavy enough ask for me to take my chances and oppose it. It’s also not clear to me how you plan to bring the nuclear powers in question to heel without some sort of a war.

I assumed it was understood that entry of any country into a world government would be decided by a referendum. In normal times, most people see the benefit in cooperation. If it is impossible to imagine the people of a nation voting to join a world government, that is because we are living in strange times.

The reason we have to force states into the 21st century is because they are holding the cities hostage. Local government only works if you keep going all the way down.

If Austin can't make abortion legal, Texas can't make it illegal.

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