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re: the NAFTA super-highway
Those wacky Canadians have bought-in to the Ron Paul “NAFTA-highway” and “amero” conspiracies!
The aliens crash-landing at Roswell is a conspiracy. The Council on Foreign Relations is real. Click on these words and see their website for yourself.
Likewise, the time-traveling antics of John Titor might be considered a conspiracy of speculation. The NAFTA super-highway has been under construction for more than 13 years already. Clicky clicky, ye of little faith.
So what? What’s wrong with a little international cooperation? What’s wrong with globalism?
In a post-Internet world, it should be clear to all that globalism is here to stay. The real question is: where will national sovereignty end, and international authority begin? For example: let us assume that Canada, the U.S. and Mexico all joined a North-America Union (NAU). Let us pretend that Mexico had outlawed the freedom of speech. Would a U.S. citizen’s rights guaranteed under the First Amendment still apply, once the NAU had been established? Would Mexicans now be granted freedom of speech, like their American counterparts? Would anything change at all?
Consider the hate-crime laws of the European Union (EU). Let us pretend that a large population of neo-NAZIs were currently living somewhere in Estonia. Let us pretend that Estonia had a strong history of freedom of speech, and culturally, they encouraged dissent. Now what? Are the Estonian neo-NAZI’s now criminals, or, is the EU simply an advisory board designing “best practices” of 21st-Century governance?
Note to Estonian readers: I am painfully ignorant about your country, and mean no disrespect by alluding to neo-NAZI’s in your midst. This is pure “what if?”.
In many ways, supra-national organizations like the EU and NAU are a natural extension of sovereign republics- nation-states banded together in union in order to achieve economies of scale, to share and localize resources for shared objectives, and to facilitate trade.
However, there is one key difference. The 50 states of our American Republic are all required to conform to the laws of the United States Constitution. In other words, New York has no authority to violate your 2nd-Amendment rights, just as Texas has no authority to violate your 1st-Amendment rights. State sovereignty exists, but these nation-states are held together by a common pact: the U.S. Constitution.
Canada and Mexico are also divided into smaller territories, held together by a federal structure, and governed by a supreme national constitution. However, these three constitutions differ on some very critical points. If merged together into a North American Union, which of these three constitutions will reign supreme? Will new supra-Constitutional laws be created? If so, how would a citizen maintain their constitutional rights, in light of this new layer of authority?
To suggest that globalism, or by extension, supra-national unions are good or bad is to miss the point of this debate entirely. Consider this: Microsoft is just one example of a U.S.-based company currently doing business internationally, currently forced to comply with an assortment of local, state, national and supra-national authorities. The reality is simple: international law and international commerce have been with us for thousands upon thousands of years. No rational person is suggesting a return to economic isolationism.
The true debate is this: why has there been no debate? Where is the transparency in this process? As citizens of America, Canada or Mexico, how can we ensure that our interests are being fairly represented? Short answer: so long as these questions are ignored as “conspiracy theory”, we can’t.
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