It's predicated on that idea because that is the essence of the world we live in. Americans vote for their government, and that government's sole legitimate purpose is to ensure American prosperity. The same is true for the Swedes in Sweden and the Germans in Germany, etc.
If you take this as an immutable truth, I think you've already created a game where the only winning move is not to play, a tragedy of the commons on a global scale.
There is nothing magical about the border between, say, Germany and France. No natural phenomenon exists to create a necessary boundary there. It is an accident of history, and the idea that people either side of the boundary should behave according to their own clan's interest at the expense of all others would seem absurd to us if we hadn't grown up with the notion that we all come from a home country.
International cooperation results in governments trading off the prosperity of their people for the prosperity of people who are not party to the same social contract, and in doing so subvert and compromise their democracy.
Only if their own people don't accept the trade-off, perhaps because they feel it is in their own long-term interest, or perhaps merely because they feel it is the right thing to do.
Here in the UK, every now and then there is a story about how we're still giving aid money to some relatively advanced country, maybe one that now has far greater financial power than we do, and often people find that inappropriate. On the other hand, we also send aid to countries that have been hit by a tornado or tsunami or earthquake, and I've never heard a single person object, even though it's ultimately their tax money that was taken involuntarily and spent on their behalf to help someone else. Intent matters.
The problem with this approach is that it results in "take it or leave it" sorts of agreements.
Maybe it does, for a while. You'd probably get the same thing if you enacted a power of recall for elected representatives who their voters didn't feel were living up to their promises during their term in office.
But after a while, people would learn that compromise is necessary to get things done, and that if everyone sticks to their guns then nothing gets done and we all lose. And then what used to be take it or leave it changes more into what's the basic foundation we can all agree with, or at least some of us can agree with for mutual benefit with the others free to walk away with no hard feelings. And then we'd be getting somewhere.
If you take this as an immutable truth, I think you've already created a game where the only winning move is not to play, a tragedy of the commons on a global scale.
There is nothing magical about the border between, say, Germany and France. No natural phenomenon exists to create a necessary boundary there. It is an accident of history, and the idea that people either side of the boundary should behave according to their own clan's interest at the expense of all others would seem absurd to us if we hadn't grown up with the notion that we all come from a home country.
International cooperation results in governments trading off the prosperity of their people for the prosperity of people who are not party to the same social contract, and in doing so subvert and compromise their democracy.
Only if their own people don't accept the trade-off, perhaps because they feel it is in their own long-term interest, or perhaps merely because they feel it is the right thing to do.
Here in the UK, every now and then there is a story about how we're still giving aid money to some relatively advanced country, maybe one that now has far greater financial power than we do, and often people find that inappropriate. On the other hand, we also send aid to countries that have been hit by a tornado or tsunami or earthquake, and I've never heard a single person object, even though it's ultimately their tax money that was taken involuntarily and spent on their behalf to help someone else. Intent matters.
The problem with this approach is that it results in "take it or leave it" sorts of agreements.
Maybe it does, for a while. You'd probably get the same thing if you enacted a power of recall for elected representatives who their voters didn't feel were living up to their promises during their term in office.
But after a while, people would learn that compromise is necessary to get things done, and that if everyone sticks to their guns then nothing gets done and we all lose. And then what used to be take it or leave it changes more into what's the basic foundation we can all agree with, or at least some of us can agree with for mutual benefit with the others free to walk away with no hard feelings. And then we'd be getting somewhere.