Self-Government or Consolidation?

Writing in the New York Times, NBC’s Tom Brokaw suggests we rethink local government in the name of efficiency. But he goes beyond common-sense suggestions for consolidation of state services and instead advocates administrative centralization.

Yet Iowa proudly maintains its grid of 99 counties, each with its own distinctive courthouse, many on the National Register of Historic Places — and some as little as 40miles away from one another. Each one houses a full complement of clerks, auditors, sheriff’s deputies, jailers and commissioners. Is there any reason beyond local pride to maintain such duplication given the economic and population pressures of our time?

Every state and every region in the country is stuck with some form of anachronistic and expensive local government structure that dates to horse-drawn wagons, family farms and small-town convenience.

There is a very good reason to maintain this “duplication”: to uphold the principle of self-government and preserve liberty, such that individuals manage their own affairs as directly as possible. This is hardly a new reason. The very existence of self-governing municipalities—even if they’re inefficient or duplicate services provided elsewhere—serves to protect liberty, Alexis de Tocqueville maintained. “The townships, municipal bodies, and counties form so many concealed breakwaters, which check or part the tide of popular determination. If an oppressive law were passed, liberty would still be protected by the mode of executing that law; the majority cannot descend to the details and what may be called the puerilities of administrative tyranny.” He added that “township institutions … limit the despotism of the majority and at the same time impart to the people a taste for freedom and the art of being free.” This principle guided the Framers as they wrote the Constitution: they deliberately limited the powers of the federal government, leaving most authority at the state or local level, so the people could govern themselves as directly as possible.

Brokaw seems to hold a fundamentally different conception of government. His analysis considers government only as a provider of services, not as a guarantor of individual liberties, and he argues, in effect, that towns, cities and counties exist merely as administrative districts of the state or federal governments.  Furthermore, he advances a common folly of the Progressives: the notion that an idea is worthless simply because it is old. He forgets, however, that while our nation has seen sweeping technological, economic and social changes, one thing remains constant: human nature. And since human nature has remained unchanged since the days of “horse-drawn wagons, family farms and small-town convenience,” the principles of government remain unchanged as well.