Alexis De Tocqueville
A while back, I noticed a nice short post from Aussie blogger The Mild Colonial Boy quoting De Tocqueville:
“It may easily be foreseen that almost all the able and ambitious members of a democratic community will labor unceasingly to extend the powers of government, because they all hope at some time or other to wield those powers themselves. It would be a waste of time to attempt to prove to them that extreme centralization may be injurious to the state, since they are centralizing it for their own benefit.”
The lesson of this is, to me, fairly clear: Politicians who talk about decentralisation are wasting our time unless they firstly look at how they can attract the most effective new politicians into local rather than national government.
On a lighter note, the ‘about the author’ page from that site is quite funny as well. The comments on the relevance to Australian politics is intriguing – my wife has just returned from Brisbane with a book in her luggage about the local politics of the city. I’d be interested to see if there are links between decentralisation and the perception of local corruption?
Good stuff. On your final question, I recall that the higest profile (and possibly main) argument employed by those opposing the introduction of elected mayors in England at the start of the decade/century/millennium was that it was a recipe for corruption, brown envelopes, contracts being awarded to the mayor’s mates, etc.
Several years on, no sign of this among the dozen local govt elected mayors. But the opponents don’t seem to have mellowed …
[...] – and the weakening of local government – can be found in a political variation on this theme – as De Tocqueville pointed out a long long time ago. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Has local government [...]
[...] Cameron’s proposals for directly elected officials and numerous referendums. Reprising the De Tocqueville quote that was used here, he concluded that it was not in the DNA of national politicians to promote decentralised [...]