Dear HCN,
As one of the founders of
King County Property Rights Alliance (King County surrounds
Seattle), I take exception to Ken Toole’s essay on the Far Right
and its wacky ideas (HCN, 12/8/97). I endorse the bulk of those
“wacky” ideas, even though I haven’t been to church, fundamentalist
or otherwise, for a good 50 years; the word or notion of Jews has
yet to come up at any of our discussions; one of our board members
belongs to the NRA but the rest hardly know one end of a gun from
the other; and none of us were bumped on the
head.
We are anti-government for good reasons.
King County prides itself on being a national environmental leader
and never met a private-property preservation idea it didn’t love.
We landowners have not only seen our highly taxed land downzoned
from urban to rural, but we’ve seen the government lock up 65
percent of our now-rural sites as recorded open space tracts from
which we can’t even clear the brush for pasture or crops. Just
about all of western Washington is deemed wetlands, and in
unincorporated King County where the 65 percent lockup is missing,
we have streams and wetlands protections mandating dryland buffers
that are bigger than the protected areas
themselves.
It’s not that we can’t make an
obscene profit from the land that we’ve “bought” many times over,
via our annual real estate taxes which keep accelerating upward;
it’s that we can’t use our own land for traditional rural uses.
Even worse, the county has back-to-pre-European nature restoration
requirements that can be triggered by applying for any kind of a
permit required from King County. (It even costs $367.50 for a
permit to cut a hazardous tree in many county
areas.)
As to the United Nations and global
governance, etc., until recently I thought it was imagination. But
having read official documents for myself, it’s not
imagination.
Maxine
Keesling
Woodinville,
Washington
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Those ideas aren’t wacky.
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