From: Lisa Dusseault (lisa@xythos.com)
Date: Fri Oct 20 2000 - 14:46:11 PDT
Clearly FoRK has a bright future eroding and appropriating the powers of the
states in which we live...
"As states integrate into a larger organization that encompasses them, they
are often made to devolve some of their internal powers to regions,
districts and communities... Even where regionalization has not yet started,
as in Germany, it is very often being discussed as one way of responding to,
and benefiting from the changes brought about by the European Union. The
days when statehood necessarily meant a movement towards greater and greater
centralization are clearly over.
While many states are either imploding or coming together, all of them face
increasing competition from other forms of organization. Some of those
organizations are private, others are public. Some are enormously powerful
and wealthy, some made up of a handful of people who do little more than
exchange their (not seldom cranky) beliefs by e-mail. "
"In the future, and to a growing extent, more and more these organizations
can be expected to emancipate themselves from state control and to play an
independent role. Playing an independent role, they will exercise growing
power over members and non-members; e.g. by making their own laws,
exercising their own justice, levying their own taxes, and even
manufacturing their own money in the form--as is often done at present--of
stock-options. Depending on the issue and on the moment, they may cooperate
with governments, exercise pressure on governments, oppose governments, and
even wage war on governments; indeed one reason why they are able to do so
is precisely because, not owning sovereign territory, they cannot be tackled
with nuclear weapons. Needless to say, the kind of relationships that
prevail between international organizations and governments will also
characterize those among those organizations itself. To the point, indeed,
where the difference between governmental and non-governmental organizations
will itself be eroded."
Full text at
http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=527&FS=The+State%3A+Its+Rise+and+
Decline
Lisa
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