The very heart and soul of modern liberalism is placing more and more power in the hands of people further and further away. Thomas Sowell pointed this out in A Conflict of Visions. He called it the "locus of discretion." For liberals, the locus of discretion--the place where power should be placed--is in the hands of bureaucratic elites. And the further away these elites are from any kind of real accountability, the better.
State bureaucrats are better than local bureaucrats; federal bureaucrats are better than state bureaucrats; and international bureaucrats are better than federal bureaucrats. And this has the extra added benefit that it gets liberals out of the uncomfortable position of having to vote for unpopular legislation that the voters don't like: they can just have faceless bureaucrats do it without anyone noticing.
The other aspect of all this is the money involved. We want more money going to further away as well, and this helps in another liberal goal: the redistribution of wealth. Liberals want to take money from taxpayers in wealthy nations and send it to poorer nations. Ostensibly, the money goes to poor people in these countries, but in reality it goes to bureaucrats in those countries who are even further outside any working system of accountability than the bureaucrats here.
Charles Krauthammer tells us how this is not working out in the age of Global Warming Alarmism:
WASHINGTON -- In the 1970s and early '80s, having seized control of the U.N. apparatus (by power of numbers), Third World countries decided to cash in. OPEC was pulling off the greatest wealth transfer from rich to poor in history. Why not them? So in grand U.N. declarations and conferences, they began calling for a "New International Economic Order." The NIEO's essential demand was simple: to transfer fantastic chunks of wealth from the industrialized West to the Third World.
On what grounds? In the name of equality -- wealth redistribution via global socialism -- with a dose of post-colonial reparations thrown in.
The idea of essentially taxing hard-working citizens of the democracies in order to fill the treasuries of Third World kleptocracies went nowhere, thanks mainly to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (and the debt crisis of the early '80s). They put a stake through the enterprise.
But such dreams never die. The raid on the Western treasuries is on again, but today with a new rationale to fit current ideological fashion. With socialism dead, the gigantic heist is now proposed as a sacred service of the newest religion: environmentalism.
One of the major goals of the Copenhagen climate summit is another NIEO shakedown: the transfer of hundreds of billions from the industrial West to the Third World to save the planet by, for example, planting green industries in the tristes tropiques ...
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