There is no evidence either from ethnographic
accounts or archaeological excavations to suggest
that rates of accidental trauma or interpersonal
violence declined substantially with the adoption
of more civilized forms of political organization.
In fact, some evidence from archaeological sites
and from historical sources suggests the opposite.
 
Mark Nathan Cohen
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: 
To: 
Cc: 
Sent: Monday, August 21, 2006 4:07 PM
Subject: unelected government boards

One of the frustrating things about the GMA and other property-regulation
programs is that much of the work is carried out by un-elected boards which
do not answer to the people and are beyond our reach. Essentially, the
legislature shirks their own responsibilties by delegating government to
these untouchable "committees".

In particular, there are three Growth Management Boards in Washington... I
believe they are Eastern Washington, Western Washington, and Greater Puget
Sound.

Our recent Washington State Supreme Court loss allowed one of these boards
to continue running roughshod over the people of Lewis County. Lewis County,
in an attempt to satisfy the state imposed demands of the GMA, has attempted
4 times to create legislation, but their unelected GM Board has refused and
sent it back to them. According to the GMA, it is up to each county to
carefully consider the balance of values, including environmental
consideration, property rights, and economic impact. However, the unelected
GM board has insisted that they were not happy with the choices of Lewis
County and keeps ordering them to rewrite it more to their satisfaction.
The Supreme Court sided with the GM Board.

However, our friend on the court, Jim Johnson, wrote a nice dissenting
opinion in our favor. You could almost collect all of Justice Johnson's
relevant opinions together and publish it as a primer on property rights! :)

Anyway, I've been doing a lot of political science reading, and I've come
across a term called Corporatism. Some people claim that, because of the
extreme improper influence of large business interests on our government,
that there are, in effect, unelected committees of special interests who are
the actual government of our country.

While I'm not 100% down with this theory, I think the idea has some
validity, and it has a close parallel to "citizen committees" like the GM
Boards -- in this case, the special interests running the show are the large
moneyed "green" groups.

------------------------

Corporatism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Historically, corporatism or corporativism (Italian corporativismo) is a
political system in which legislative power is given to civic assemblies
that represent economic, industrial, agrarian, and professional groups.
Unlike pluralism, in which many groups must compete for control of the
state, in corporatism, certain unelected bodies take a critical role in the
decision-making process. These corporatist assemblies are not the same as
contemporary business corporations or incorporated groups.

The word "corporatism" is derived from the Latin word for body, corpus. This
original meaning was not connected with the specific notion of a business
corporation, but rather a general reference to anything collected as a body.
Its usage reflects medieval European concepts of a whole society in which
the various components each play a part in the life of the society, just as
the various parts of the body serve specific roles in the life of a body.
According to various theorists, corporatism was an attempt to create a
"modern" version of feudalism by merging the "corporate" interests with
those of the state. (Also see neofeudalism.)

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