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?