[CT] UN, EU and WTO

[Daniel Moran]

At 07:20 PM 7/5/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>10 of the 12 wealthiest states, including Washington DC,
> > voted liberal -- something about highly regulated environments appears to
> > produce wealth, wouldn't you say?
>
>Post hoc, ergo proctor hoc.  It's a fallacy.  You could as easily
>claim that great wealth produces regulations.

Fair enough -- sloppy language on my part, I wrote that post in one draft. 
As I said in the previous post, I suspect they're feedback effects -- a 
little wealth, a little regulation, more wealth, more regulation, etc. 
Remove the wealth and the regulation is meaningless; remove regulation and 
the wealth disappears.

>In fact, you have
>presented evidence for neither, only for an association.

Yep. But it's an overwhelmingly clear association.

>Even
>that association is confounded by others, such as the common
>regional characteristics.

Such as?

> > The same appears to be true in the world at large. Here's the per capita
> > GDP by country for 2000:
>
>Certainly this is not the entire list, and hence, less than
>useless.

That's a little harsh. But here, go to town: 
http://www.worldbank.org/data/databytopic/GDP.pdf

Can't cut and paste out of a PDF file and didn't want to type up the 182 
countries listed. But there's nothing in there that detracts from the 
underlying premise, IMO.

>World government will eventually come about, driven in part by
>the Internet.  (The alternative is a separate "internet
>government", which is intriguing).  This world government might
>be a good thing, but most likely will not be.  Why?  It can only
>come about by conquest, and once complete, will offer primarily
>a vehicle for the exploitation of successful nations by those
>less successful.

I think this is the most probable scenario too. And yeah, it's bad news. 
The rest of your analysis strikes me as pretty dead-on too.

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