I ran across this in a Locus interview:
...As I see it, our biggest problem is that we've effectively got a planetary government that's running on autopilot, governed by international treaty law and the fundamental systems of the way the global free-trade regime has been set up. Not only is there nobody at the controls, there's nobody to complain to when things go wrong -- it's unaccountable. Traditional empires had safety valves for public protest -- the current system doesn't have one.Lots of people argue that we need (or need to avoid) a world government, whether based on the UN or some new democratic body. What they don't realize is that we already have one and it's growing, the WTO and Kyoto being the most obvious examples of its reach.