30-04-2009, 04:06 PM
I know I'm not expressing my thoughts about this very clearly because it is a very complicated concept he talked about. What I think is that it's very hard to find the money to pay for things a governmental entity want to accomplish. What I've seen in research I've done is that ways are devised to pay for such things by following legal models outside of the way "the law" says they are to be funded.
I don't know how schools are set up in England, but in Texas the law, which is the Texas Constitution and statutes, mandates that the people within the school district have to vote for improvements that will not be paid for out of the current budget. That means they have to market bonds to people willing to buy them and collect the interest over a period of years. Usually the school district has a stockbroker who has an attorney who issues its bonds and markets them to the general public.
That is the way most governmental functions are financed by law--through people engaged in municipal brokerage. Over the years, however, as bonds may not have paid out as promised. Also, the municipal traders are always looking for ways to keep their own incomes coming in and/or increasing. What I saw in Houston when I worked there for the county attorney was that the statutes were constantly being changed to cover new types of governmental entities that did not conform to the constitution.
(This is already getting much more complicated than anyone reading it would care to learn, I can tell, and that is why Mr. Harris can find a receptive audience.)
In Houston when I was there the county owned the already obsolete Astrodome, which had been built in the early 1960's I think. It was probably one of the first stadiums built with the concept of making it a "public purpose" for a government to entertain people or to provide an exposition center for people to gather for sporting events, etc. By changing the law, the financiers of the Astrodome were able to acquire land by eminent domain and issue tax-exempt bonds.
However, by 1990 the Astrodome was no longer a favorable place for the baseball team to play, and the owner said he would move the team to another city if the county fathers did not build a new stadium. Since the lease the team had signed still had several years to run, that meant he would break the lease which should have made it worthless, plus causing a penalty that could have been assessed against him.
That was the opinion that some of the attorneys working for the then-county attorney wrote. But the elected county attorney did not give that advice to the other officials. Instead, he agreed to work with them in figuring out a way to buy out a legally worthless property (the years remaining on a lease that was to be broken) in order to come up with funds that could be considered as equity from the team toward a new stadium.
That is what did happen. They got around the law with creative new financing or simply ignoring the law as it was written. When we had given similar advice a couple of years earlier about the county's helping to finance a horse racing track, the county fathers had simply hired a bond attorney to lobby the legislature to pass a new law to authorize such things.
The point I'm making is that the statutes and the corporations John Harris talks about in his video are the way our governments work. Under the original political theories of Locke and Montesquieu and other theorists of democratic and republic governments we have to reach consensus with other voters in the community in order to create constitutions. Those constitutions delegate day-to-day operations to the congress and to legislators to write statutes, which are then interpreted by courts and enforced by executives. In America that checks and balances system was written into the constitution.
Over time, as bureaucratic financiers become ever more creative, they convince our elected officials to engage with them in projects to give the people more than was ever bargained for by those who founded the system a century or more ago. But that IS how THE LAW does work.
Do I like it? No way. I resigned from my job and left Houston. But I don't see it changing. Recently we made a trip back to Houston, and I was amazed to see how the downtown area had changed. In the years I worked there, as I walked from my bus stop to work, I had to dodge panhandlers and alcoholics who slept and urinated in the streets. Now those same areas are serviced by modern rail transport, another new stadium and even people living downtown in loft apartments.
All I'm saying is that government is not as simple as John Harris and the group he is a part of would like us to believe it is. Government really does involve trade because it is one of the largest components of public enterprise.
I don't know how schools are set up in England, but in Texas the law, which is the Texas Constitution and statutes, mandates that the people within the school district have to vote for improvements that will not be paid for out of the current budget. That means they have to market bonds to people willing to buy them and collect the interest over a period of years. Usually the school district has a stockbroker who has an attorney who issues its bonds and markets them to the general public.
That is the way most governmental functions are financed by law--through people engaged in municipal brokerage. Over the years, however, as bonds may not have paid out as promised. Also, the municipal traders are always looking for ways to keep their own incomes coming in and/or increasing. What I saw in Houston when I worked there for the county attorney was that the statutes were constantly being changed to cover new types of governmental entities that did not conform to the constitution.
(This is already getting much more complicated than anyone reading it would care to learn, I can tell, and that is why Mr. Harris can find a receptive audience.)
In Houston when I was there the county owned the already obsolete Astrodome, which had been built in the early 1960's I think. It was probably one of the first stadiums built with the concept of making it a "public purpose" for a government to entertain people or to provide an exposition center for people to gather for sporting events, etc. By changing the law, the financiers of the Astrodome were able to acquire land by eminent domain and issue tax-exempt bonds.
However, by 1990 the Astrodome was no longer a favorable place for the baseball team to play, and the owner said he would move the team to another city if the county fathers did not build a new stadium. Since the lease the team had signed still had several years to run, that meant he would break the lease which should have made it worthless, plus causing a penalty that could have been assessed against him.
That was the opinion that some of the attorneys working for the then-county attorney wrote. But the elected county attorney did not give that advice to the other officials. Instead, he agreed to work with them in figuring out a way to buy out a legally worthless property (the years remaining on a lease that was to be broken) in order to come up with funds that could be considered as equity from the team toward a new stadium.
That is what did happen. They got around the law with creative new financing or simply ignoring the law as it was written. When we had given similar advice a couple of years earlier about the county's helping to finance a horse racing track, the county fathers had simply hired a bond attorney to lobby the legislature to pass a new law to authorize such things.
The point I'm making is that the statutes and the corporations John Harris talks about in his video are the way our governments work. Under the original political theories of Locke and Montesquieu and other theorists of democratic and republic governments we have to reach consensus with other voters in the community in order to create constitutions. Those constitutions delegate day-to-day operations to the congress and to legislators to write statutes, which are then interpreted by courts and enforced by executives. In America that checks and balances system was written into the constitution.
Over time, as bureaucratic financiers become ever more creative, they convince our elected officials to engage with them in projects to give the people more than was ever bargained for by those who founded the system a century or more ago. But that IS how THE LAW does work.
Do I like it? No way. I resigned from my job and left Houston. But I don't see it changing. Recently we made a trip back to Houston, and I was amazed to see how the downtown area had changed. In the years I worked there, as I walked from my bus stop to work, I had to dodge panhandlers and alcoholics who slept and urinated in the streets. Now those same areas are serviced by modern rail transport, another new stadium and even people living downtown in loft apartments.
All I'm saying is that government is not as simple as John Harris and the group he is a part of would like us to believe it is. Government really does involve trade because it is one of the largest components of public enterprise.
"History records that the Money Changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance." --James Madison