Abstract
An oft-cited refrain of the advocates for local government is that local government is closest to the people and therefore serves the people best. This asserted closeness may be the case geographically, but I question how many people feel that they are close to their local government in a more substantive sense. Do we really feel that local government serves us, or are we instead in a more subservient relationship wherein we are coerced to give over portions of our wealth which are then spent on programs and assets that we have little say on? This chapter explores the reasons for why one might feel that local government requires reform. To do so, I make recourse to a personal finance metaphor which pervades much of the remainder of this book and briefly outline some of the major tenets of theories upon which later chapters will be founded.
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Notes
- 1.
In truth a lot of this money came from a state government grant just before the last state election (I imagine they might have us believe that the timing was sheer coincidence). However, the costs of maintaining the skate park will dwarf the capital costs of construction pretty quickly. Moreover, it would be nice to think that a local government would have the moral fortitude to ask the state government to direct their grants towards providing essential and basic services, rather than becoming complicit in a pretty obvious case of park barrelling.
- 2.
Natural law philosophy harks back to at least the time of Aristotle and asserts that ‘right’ action can be determined by observing nature and using practical reason. There is a natural law tradition in all three monotheistic faiths also, which asserts that divine revelation is also a way to understand right from wrong.
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Drew, J. (2020). An Introduction to Reforming Local Government. In: Reforming Local Government. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6503-8_1
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