[rayiner]

I'm not sure how you can look around the world and decide that what would make people in the U.S. better off is to make our body politic even more heterogenous and schizophrenic. We have enough trouble with Texas and California in the same union.

I look around the world and what I see is that the countries people generally admire from the point of view of quality of life: the Scandinavian countries, Japan, etc, have a high degree of cultural and political homogeneity and unity. Meanwhile, I see a European Union in meltdown because of the difficulty of forming a political union between people in countries with very different economies and cultures.

I also see international organizations like the United Nations that are deeply dysfunctional, and fundamentally compromised by the influence of a number of Asian, Middle Eastern, and African countries who bring to it their basically corrupt political systems. Don't get me wrong, I think the U.N. is great for things like coordinating disaster relief and whatnot, but I can't imagine a world where something like the U.N. exercising political influence in the U.S. would in any way be good for Americans.

[derefr]

Oh, I'm definitely not suggesting that American's own body politic should grow, by any means. If anything America could do with being split into about four different countries. (Not on any usefully-simple geographical lines, though; something more like "charter cities"/"special economic zones" might do better. An ideal division might be "The United Farmlands of America" and "The United Metropolises of America", since each group has pretty homogeneous opinions on how "their country" should be run.)

It would certainly be nice, though, if countries of people who do have homogeneous bodies politic, where country A is interested in the political decisions country B make because they affect A, could somehow trade something of their own for the right to have their own people get some control over A's affairs. They might, perhaps... buy stock in A? :)

(There's actually a lot of things putting governmental-policy "stocks" on a global market would solve, when you think about it. Certainly problems too, of course, but consider, for one thing, that it offers a workable alternative to "takeover by war" and "eternal austerity" that some Eurozone countries have been looking for for years now: "takeover by transfer of controlling equity as a liquidated asset during default.")