Why You Should Not Worry About One-World Government

Gary North - January 30, 2019

I came into the conservative movement in the mid-1950's. The woman who initiated me was a well-meaning lady who was forever worried about world government.

She worried most about the United Nations. So did all of the other ladies who met in study groups in Southern California. There were a lot of these study groups in Southern California back then. Their members really did believe that UNICEF was a threat to their liberty. I never did figure out why UNICEF was a threat to my liberty. They also worried about UNESCO. When was the last time you worried about UNESCO? Do you know what UNESCO is? It still exists. So does UNICEF. But, unlike UNICEF, there aren't any UNESCO non-Christmas cards. So, it doesn't get a lot of publicity. UNICEF still sells them. I have never actually seen one, but Amazon sells them.

Ever since the 1950's, we have seen the proliferation of international governmental organizations, known as IGO's. There are dozens of them. Wikipedia offers this list. Here are the ones devoted to finance and trade. One of the better-known ones is the World Trade Organization, better known as the WTO. It supposedly regulates the terms of international trade. I have never figured out how it does this. It has no enforcement arm. Its agents do not wear badges and carry guns. The bureaucrats who receive their high salaries at the WTO can issue directives. They can tell a national government what it is allowed to do. But they cannot impose fines and collect them. The WTO cannot make Congress comply. It cannot tell the British Parliament to comply.

None of these agencies has operational sovereignty. They have paper sovereignty only. They cannot enforce the law. They can only issue directives.

Every time the WTO or any other United Nations-related organization issues a command to a nation that a majority of the legislature does not want to enforce, the members of the majority should reach into their respective desks, and put on one of those large plastic hands that we see fans wearing at sports events. Here is what the plastic hands look like.

The hand that I recommend looks similar to one of these hands, but not identical.

What, exactly, is the WTO, UN, or XYZ organization going to do in response? Send in an army? No. Tax the non-cooperating national government? How? Send in a squad of uniformed agents and arrest every member of the legislature? I don't think so.

If a law is not backed up by physical sanctions, it is not a law. It is merely a suggestion.

The WTO, UN, etc. can make all the suggestions they want. No national government has to take any of these suggestions seriously.

MY RECOMMENDATION TO THE GREENS

This is why I am all in favor of having the greens focus on a getting some kind of international agreement on climate change signed by senior representatives of every nation on earth. Since none of these nations is going to submit to any United Nations agency that regulates carbon emissions, there is no threat to national sovereignty.

There is a potential domestic political threat. The government might be taken over by global warmers, and they might use the nonbinding, unenforceable agreement to justify domestic rules governing carbon emissions. But any national government can do this anyway. It does not need a piece of paper signed by 200 other governments calling for reduction of carbon emissions.

The more energy and money that the greens spend on trying to persuade their national governments to enter into such an agreement, the less time and money they are going to spend on trying to organize voters to elect politicians who will pursue the greens' agenda. The greens do not have unlimited money and unlimited organizational resources. It is far better for liberty that they concentrate on the expensive pursuit of an international greased pig than on domestic political mobilization.

The more money that special-interest groups spend on trying to persuade their national legislatures to send agents to a meeting of the UN to come up with some declaration, the better it is for liberty. Resources are always scarce.

It is better to have your political opponent spend resources on mapping out roots to a dead end then it is for the opponent to spend money on some project that might in fact have domestic legal consequences.

BREXIT AND THE WTO

I was reminded of this by an article on the British leftist website, The Guardian. The editorial policy of the site is anti-Brexit. The editors are deservedly panicked over the fact that in less than two months, Britain is scheduled to be booted out of the European Union. Oh, woe!

The Guardian, along with virtually the entire British Left, is trying to scare Parliament into doing something to stop this. Parliament, meanwhile, is paralyzed. It can't decide what to do. The clock is ticking. (Now, there is a phrase out of the technologically obsolete past.) The alarm is scheduled to ring on March 29.

Some promoters of Brexit say that Britain will be allowed to operate under WTO rules, which are generally low-tariff rules. Well, The Guardian won't tolerate that! So, it ran this two-stage headline:

UK cannot simply trade on WTO terms after no-deal Brexit, say experts

UK may face seven-year wait for frictionless trade under WTO rules if it crashes out of EU

First, who says these people are experts? Second, does anybody at the WTO pay any attention to them? Third, even if they are technically correct from a legal standpoint, what is the WTO going to do about it?

The British Parliament can set tariffs higher or lower than what the WTO requires. The WTO cannot impose meaningful sanctions. It can issue a directive of some sort. It will take a couple of years for the bureaucrats to write such a directive. But what if they do?

Furthermore, if the British Parliament sets tariffs below WTO-recommended tariffs, the WTO is going to stay silent. The British economy will be better off if Parliament does exactly this. There will be more trade.

The text of the article is even more sensational, and even less in touch with economic reality, than the twin headlines are. Example:

The UK will be unable to have frictionless, tariff-free trade under World Trade Organization rules for up to seven years in the event of a no-deal Brexit, according to two leading European Union law specialists.

The ensuing chaos could double food prices and plunge Britain into a recession that could last up to 30 years, claim the lawyers who acted for Gina Miller in the historic case that forced the government to seek parliament’s approval to leave the EU.

A recession that lasts 30 years would be three times longer than the Great Depression. Did the journalist who wrote the article really expect anyone to believe this? If so, then their target audience is made up mainly of people with zero understanding of British economic history. Except for the ten-year period of the Great Depression, the UK has experienced real economic growth of at least 2% per capita per year beginning no later than 1820, and probably beginning around 1800.

This theory of the 30-year recession is going to be tested very soon. The test is scheduled to begin in less than two months. My prediction is simple: there is not going to be a recession that lasts 30 years. There could be a recession, but that will be the result of Britain's central bank policy, not Britain's departure out of the European Union. Britain will still be able to sell goods and especially services to the rest of the world. If it sets low tariffs, it will sell more goods to the rest of the world than would otherwise have sold. Even European buyers will buy British goods and services, despite tariffs against non-EU member states. There will initially be a decline of trade with the EU, but why is this going to create a 30-year recession?

We are then given more information.

It has been claimed that the UK could simply move to WTO terms if there is no deal with the EU. But Anneli Howard, a specialist in EU and competition law at Monckton Chambers and a member of the bar’s Brexit working group, believes this isn’t true.

“No deal means leaving with nothing,” she said. “The anticipated recession will be worse than the 1930s, let alone 2008. It is impossible to say how long it would go on for. Some economists say 10 years, others say the effects could be felt for 20 or even 30 years: even ardent Brexiters agree it could be decades.”

If it is really impossible to say how long it would go on, then it would be wise for Ms. Howard not to cite nameless economists who claim it will last as long as the Great Depression did, or twice as long, or three times as long. The best approach would be to avoid saying say how long it is going to last, given the fact that it is impossible to say how long it is going to last. But economic logic does not interest Ms. Anneli. She is a lawyer. Lawyers are trained to persuade juries, not understand economics.

We are told the following: "even ardent Brexters agree it could be decades." Really? Who are these people? The article doesn't name anybody.

We are told that a clean Brexit is impossible because of WTO rules. These rules are complex. How complex? Very complex. I don't argue with this assessment.

Firstly, the UK must produce its own schedule covering both services and each of the 5,000-plus product lines covered in the WTO agreement and get it agreed by all the 163 WTO states in the 32 remaining parliamentary sitting days until 29 March 2019. A number of states have already raised objections to the UK’s draft schedule: 20 over goods and three over services.

To make it more complicated, there are no “default terms” Britain can crash out on, Howard said, while at the same time, the UK has been blocked by WTO members from simply relying on the EU’s “schedule” – its existing tariffs and tariff-free trade quotas.

The second hurdle is the sheer volume of domestic legislation that would need to be passed before being able to trade under WTO rules: there are nine statutes and 600 statutory instruments that would need to be adopted.

The government cannot simply cut and paste the 120,000 EU statutes into UK law and then make changes to them gradually, Howard said. “The UK will need to set up new enforcement bodies and transfer new powers to regulators to create our own domestic regimes,” she said.

Here is how bureaucracies work: slowly, if at all. If the WTO has this many rules, which it probably does, then it will have to bring specific charges against the British government, rule by rule, infraction by infraction, accusing the government of specific violations. Then the government can stall. It doesn't take much to stall an international bureaucracy that has no enforcement powers. Case by case, the British government can challenge the WTO's assessment. Each case will have to be settled by the WTO's court process. How long do you think that will take? I'll tell you how long: way longer than the alleged British recession.

It is the very complexity of the WTO's bureaucracy that guarantees that the bureaucracy cannot impose meaningful sanctions against some national government that has failed to cooperate. Maybe on some obscure rule it can gain compliance, but only because the government decides not to fight the ruling. But this government may be thrown out of office at the next election because it complied or for any other reason. The new government may decide it won't comply. What can the WTO do about that? It can issue a formal complaint.

BLIND MEN'S BLUFF

This is why nobody should worry about the rise of a one-world government. These IGOs are not coordinated by general rules. There is no agency with sanctions above any of them. There is no appeals court system. There is no enforcement mechanism. There is no central plan. The existing IGO system would have to be completely restructured by the world government. The bureaucrats would have to learn how to work under a brand-new system. The bureaucrats at the top of the new system would have to gain cooperation of the tenured bureaucrats who have spent their entire careers inside the existing system. How long do you think that would take?

The existing system is a way to employ tens of thousands of overpaid bureaucrats to do almost nothing. Being bureaucrats, they are specialists in doing nothing. They do nothing exceedingly well. They also do it expensively, but when we really think about it, the money we pay them is probably money well-spent. Special-interest groups are always trying to get these agencies to do what the special-interest groups want them to do, which is a wonderful way of wasting a lot of time and a lot of money.

If national governments cooperate with the rules issued by some IGO, that can be a problem. But the problem isn't the IGO. The problem is the national legislature or some bureaucratic agency that was created by the national legislature, and is funded by the national legislature. The IGO's directive is simply window dressing for the control freaks in national bureaucracies. "See? We have to enforce this. The XYZ agency has said we do."

What should be the response of the national legislature? The best response would be to eliminate the particular agency. But that never happens. The second-best response would be to cut the agencies funding. But that never happens, either. The third-best response would be to pull out of the international agreement. That might happen. This response is basically the invocation of the plastic hand.

CONCLUSION

World government means international bureaucracy. International bureaucracy means dozens and dozens of separate, virtually autonomous bureaucracies. There is no way to coordinate these bureaucracies. There has never been a United Nations attempt to coordinate them. Some of them are not UN agencies.

A directive of an IGO has authority only if a national government decides to cooperate. For all of the screaming about the loss of national sovereignty, there has been almost no loss of national sovereignty as a result of IGO's. The only authority that an IGO has is the authority granted by a national government through voluntary submission.

Here is a general rule governing sovereignty. Without physical sanctions and the threat of physical sanctions, there is no sovereignty.

When you hear "surrender of national sovereignty," think "plastic hand."

The invisible hand of the free market and the plastic hand of domestic political sovereignty go together. One hand washes the other. But we can see only one of them.