A free market in government: until the turn of the century, when the Progressives decided there was too much diversity about, most power in America was exercised on the local level. It could be again

National Review, Oct 27, 1989 by Donald Devine

Until the turn of the century, when the Progressives decided there was too much diversity about, most power in America was exercised on the local level It could be again.

CONSERVATISM iS becoming boring. By now, anyone who

knows anything knows that freedom works, that the

market is the only way to rationalize an economy. When even Chinese and Soviet Communists see the light, an insight is on its way toward becoming a cliche.

True, U.S. congressmen seem not to have learned this lesson; but their furtive glances betray them. You might have missed it, but during the debate on the minimumwage bill, Teddy Kennedy himself quietly exempted Puerto Rico because not even he wanted to drive that many people out of work.

Likewise, it is hard to work up much anti-Communist fervor when the whole socialist enterprise seems to be falling apart. Undoubtedly, we should find some way to help the Eastern Europeans and the Soviet nationalities loosen the Kremlin's bonds; but this is almost kicking a guy when he's down, hardly an inspiring assignment.

There are controversies, to be sure, but in a perverse way the current ill will between social and economic conservatives exists, to a great degree, because there is no debate on the economic side. So the debate focuses too narrowly upon the desirability of the ends, rather than looking at both means and ends. Yet modern conservatism means nothing without both: it is libertarian means in a conservative society that will produce traditionalist ends. That was the fusionist insight of Frank Meyer, William Buckley, and others, which started the conservative movement moving in the Fifties.

The challenge for conservatives today is to find the appropriate call to arms for a new conservative vision based upon the original fusionist ideal, harnessing the energy of social conservatives and the rationality of economic conservatives for the good not only of the conservative movement but of the country.

Take two problems most worrying to social conservatives: the problems of values in schools and of pornography. How about arguing that, in fact, these problems were solved in the past by libertarian means-by using a large number of independent corporations, called local governments, in a market that allowed freedom and choice? For most of American history, local, independent districts defined the values schools taught, and local governments regulated standards for pornography. Yet despite the regulation, there were so many different standards that the overall picture was diversity and freedom.

As Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek has noted, Western freedom itself developed around the "sworn commune" of the voluntarily created city. Freedom sprang up in the interstices between the municipalities, the feudal estates, the church, and the central monarchy. The "political anarchy" created by the competition among the different powers permitted freedom to flower in the cracks. Traders could choose to operate in those cities which provided the necessary commercial freedom.

IN AMERICA, the original pattern of local settlement almost perfectly followed a Lockean-libertarian social contract

model. When a group of people did not like the values where they were, they moved and created another voluntary community based upon their own values. Consequently, the preponderance of power and responsibility rested with the localities: even at the dawn of the twentieth century, 90 per cent of government spending was done by local government. State and national governments were insignificant in comparison to both the private sector and local government.

But a little group called the Progressives ended all of that. They did not like such untidy diversity and wanted to organize the resulting anarchical confusion. They wanted to "run government in a businesslike way," to apply economies of scale to what Edmund Burke had more feelingly seen as "little platoons." This perversion of the

capitalist vision swept all before it. While the private sector today still accounts for much more than three fourths of the total economy, local government now handles a minority of government activity. The shocking fact is that, thanks to the Progressives, there are no more municipalities, towns, and townships in 1989 than there were in 1889. In 1942, there were 108,000 school districts in the U.S.; there are fewer than 15,000 today.

Two Progressive reforms created this revolution. The first was the urban annexation movement, whereby cities (and school districts) gobbled up adjacent municipalities and unincorporated land. While the intellectual force behind this movement should not be underestimated, Progressivism's most valuable ally here was the newly created penny press, the metropolitan dailies. The newspapers quickly recognized that the larger the unit, the more customers would identify with the urban-named newspaper.

New York City itself was only created in the late 1890s from two score local governments. Every other American

city followed a similar, if less dramatic, pattern. Yet, after Progressivism created these monstrosities, the cities began to destroy themselves. A half-century of federal aid has not restored them to the livability they enjoyed when they had a fraction of their current private wealth.