Locally Grown
The Art of Sustainable Government
America has become top-heavy and is starting to display stress fractures along familiar lines. Unsustainable social programs, income inequality exacerbated by rapid technological change, and the pressures of being the global policeman are creating deep ideological divisions in our nation. Citizens are losing faith in institutions once considered unassailable strengths of our republic. Civil political dialogue has been replaced by shrill emotional attacks between those with differing opinions. Agreement on the common good, our historical binding force, is no longer agreed upon. Lots of folks see the problems, but their solutions seem limited to either more government control or tearing down the government. As always, the solutions lie somewhere in the middle.
Locally Grown: The Art of Sustainable Government re-introduces readers to our bottom-up constitutional design and shows how it can be used to better distribute responsibilities between our federal, state and local governments. The book introduces the concept of “sustainability” as the guiding principle for determining the size and scope of government. Our bottom-up constitutional architecture is aligned with “self-evident” natural laws that can sustainably balance our three levels of government and the competing forces of individual freedom and the common good. Our twenty thousand state and municipal laboratories are positioned to handle many difficult problems better than a leviathan federal government led by a few bureaucrats. This crowd sourcing of problem solving has been the bedrock of science for centuries, so we know it works.
Locally Grown Government focuses solutions on where life is actually lived. Where we work, shop, and go to school. It celebrates that life is richer and healthier when lived more locally. For example, local production of food is more transparent and accountable because we can visit the local farms and see how the food is produced. More localized government can similarly provide better quality, transparency and accountability than a distant central government because public servants are more accountable to the citizens they see every day. Locally Grown is a way of performing government functions that respects diversity and freedom while acting as a natural immune system against the ideological diseases that plague our federal system and the national media. If you’re curious how to make government more responsive, holistic and sustainable, you need to read this book.