A bit of a knee-jerk reaction, Ludwig, don't you think?

>>So would a human union lead to weaker border protection with a large influx of asylum seekers, or perhaps to entirely open borders? If there is any chance of that, then STUFF IT entirely!!<<

The point was made in the article, although I suspect you may have missed it completely.

"In a world where... we are among the wealthiest and most privileged, there should be more to foreign policy than the question of how best to preserve our privileged position... and keeping people out of our privileged land... as the policy of defending our relative privileges through border protection and wars that we follow abroad will only be the prelude for more wars and more “need” to protect our borders.<<

Which bit of this do you disagree with?

The fact that we are extremely lucky to live where we do, and live the way we do?

The fact that keeping everyone else out of Australia is a self-defeating proposition?

The fact that escalating our border protection is subject to the law of diminishing returns?

The fact that the best way to draw attention to our relatively privileged position is to close our doors?

The point is that a little more generosity of spirit can have the effect of raising everyone up, rather than continue the "it's us or them" dog-in-a-manger approach to life.

It might be one area where the Christians could set us all an example, perhaps? After all, it's what they are supposed to stand for, isn't it?

The old adage "that the road to hell is paved with good intentions,"fits here. In other words good intentions are not enough.
You have to go to the UNDERLYING CAUSE, that of itself, creates so much misery and needless suffering in the world. And it is not people, because people are born neither good nor bad, but shaped, moulded, reacted upon, by the type of society they live in. For instance, we live in a society dominated by profit relations and these relations lead to conditions of oppression, exploitation and needless misery. Society is set up, so that, each is against all and divisions are fostered to divide and conquer. For instance, workers are 2,500 million strong but they are very deliberately divided. So consequently, workers do not know their real strength.
Like every other article of comerce, almost everything is treated as a commodity to be brought and sold - including water. Workers too, are a commodity whereby they must sell their labor power and get robbed in this transaction. It is profit relations that determine so much, and this controls men and woman. It is not the other way round, that men and woman control profits, no they become consumed and dominated by ever greater profits. Almost daily in the news new problems and catastrophies are thrown up. None of the immense number of problems that beset society can realy be resolved until goods are produced not for profits but peoples needs.

Johncee says nothing can be done until we get rid of capitalism, i.e. “until goods are produced not for profits but peoples needs.” But Johncee what if the people who had wanted to:
Abolish slavery
Bring in equal rights for women
Start the EU which the author uses as an example anyhow

Had decided to wait for the abolition of capitalism before doing anything? None of these would have been done. Plenty of good things can be done without abolishing capitalism. Saying they can’t be done without abolishing capitalist first makes the anti capitalist in fact a complete conservative

Pericles

You seem to be assuming that border protection means keeping people out. It doesn’t. It means tightly controlling the intake and restricting it to formal immigration channels.

Strong border protection does not mean closing the doors.

We in Australia are among the wealthiest and most privileged in the world. So we should be required to spend a considerably larger amount of our collective income on helping raise the quality of life of those who desperately need it, across the world, with a particular emphasis on population stabilisation and sustainability.

If a human union can achieve this, then great. But before I can support it, it has to be shown that this approach will occur, and not some totally destructive approach of porous borders and massive movements of people into places where enormous conflict would be generated.

It appeared from your post, Ludwig, that "keeping people out" was exactly what you had in mind.

>>You seem to be assuming that border protection means keeping people out. It doesn’t. It means tightly controlling the intake and restricting it to formal immigration channels.<<

I don't see any change in this approach to that which we already have, which is obviously your comfort zone.

Fair enough. But don't for a moment think that by ignoring it, the rest of the world will simply go away - which once again, I should point out, is the point of the article.

So, except for your knee-jerk keep-'em-out reaction to the idea in general, which aspects of the argument, specifically, do you disagree with? And how would you address these problems, apart from burying your head in the sand and pretending they don't exist?

The only aspect of a Human Union that concerns me - and I have to confess it is a big one - is that it will end up being run by politicians. The scope for head-in-the-public-trough greed will expand enormously, and as we know, wherever there is an advertised vacancy for personal venality, it gets filled by a politician.

But the underlying issue, that we need to think more realistically about our unbalanced position in the world, won't go away.

Pericles,

There is a article by Daniele Fanelli on p. 10 of the Oct. 6 (2007) New Scientist. It contains a graph showing that it would take approximately 3 Earths to give everyone a decent standard of living and some personal freedom, even if all resources were shared equallly. Only Cuba combined a relatively high rank on the UN Human Development Index and consumption levels that would not require additional Earths if they were shared by everyone. Somehow I don't think you would like the austerity there, though, or the lack of personal freedom. This doesn't even consider the negative effects of future environmental deterioration. How are we responsible for other people's family size preferences? Are we obliged to trash our own environment (the CSIRO Future Dilemmas report in 2002 recommended population stabilisation at 20 million) or our own children's future to bail them out?

The standard argument that we are laying ourselves open to invasion if we don't open our borders is nonsense. Densely populated countries get invaded, even if they are ethnically similar to the invaders (Belgium and the Netherlands by Germany in WWII). Big, densely populated countries get invaded too (China by Japan in WWII). If you are really worried about invasion perhaps you should be pushing for nuclear weapons. Note that North Korea, a fifth rate power if there ever was one, is giving China, Japan, and the US a lot of grief in different ways, but no one is game to invade. Israel has been standing off hostile neighbours who collectively have many times its population for the past 60 years.

I am also curious about whether you would apply your open borders argument to private property. No doubt there are people in the community who could benefit from some of yours.