The Role of the United Nations in the Post-Wall Street World

The global village is no longer some mythical economic universe. The domino effect that began with a mortgage crisis in the United States and spurred an historic worldwide economic recession is tangible economic proof that our village knows no boundaries. If the United Nations once existed with the dubious purpose to facilitate diplomacy, it exists today with a clear purpose to facilitate international economy. The role of the United Nations must rise in significance to oversee the building of an international economic infrastructure to deliver health, knowledge and security to the world.

There are those who will argue that the idea of an international governing body will impede the sovereign rights of individual nations. No doubt individual nations will have to make concessions; in the short run, the biggest concessions will be made by those nations that have the most to concede. The fundamentals of strong economy, be it local, state, national or global, suggest that the opportunity cost of waiting for another global economic meltdown necessitates that we make these concessions with urgency. Everybody wins with a universal workforce and consumption base that is healthy, educated, and secure.

As the argument persists in the United States for and against an affordable health care system that approaches “socialized health care,” there are little who doubt that the collective health of American citizens continue to diminish. Globally, the picture is even worse. In Haiti and Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the rapid spread of HIV and AIDS continues to devastate development. Potential consumers and workers here whither in the forgotten shadows of the developed world. The developed world must wake up and smell the roses among these withering populations. A healthy global workforce is a happy and productive workforce.

If a healthy global population provides the base of a healthy economy, an infrastructure for education can make global health sustainable. Education can provide an infrastructure for preventative health care by instilling healthy mental and physical habits. Reading, writing, math, science, economics, and history should be a matter of course in the development of all societies; today, even in many developed nations, such basic pillars of a good education are absent. The slope of global progress continues to flatten.

Despair arises in the absence of knowledge and health. Terrorism grows in places cast indefinitely in the shadows of the developed world, where your best opportunity for health, knowledge and security may well be within the underground lairs of violent fringe movements. Think how easily we all have been culled into a fringe movement in the discontent of our youth before judging the choices of a young man whose existence is fraught with famine, disease, and violence. It is a desire for security in a chaotic world that drives these men to the fringe; violence goes without saying for those who have never known peace. The global opportunity cost for the existence of an unhealthy and uneducated “third world” population both creates and exacerbates the threat of terrorism; it is a global economic hindrance regardless of the security of your borders. Military action is a short term and sometimes shortsighted solution. Economic opportunity may sound more like a fantasy than a pragmatic solution; it is both.

Health, knowledge, and security are the interdependent pillars of our global economy long overdue for a strong global infrastructure. The United Nation’s purpose has never been clearer: to develop a borderless economic strategy that responds to an international economy that knows no borders.