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Nature over Art: No More Local Finance*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2013
Extract
In 1866 an uncommonly knowledgeable gentleman, Alexis de Tocqueville by name, wrote as follows: “Je pense que dans les siècles démocratiques qui vont s'ouvrir l'indépendence individuelle et les libertés locales seront toujours un produit de l'art. La centralisation sera le gouvernement naturel.” Four score and five years later a distinguished compatriot documented the triumph of nature over art which de Tocqueville contemplated as a possibility, and analyzed at some length the instrumentality through which le gouvernement naturel has established its primacy over les libertés locales. Professor Jean Boulouis has recently pronounced a plaintive requiem for French local self-government culminating in these words: “On pourrait presque avancer, sans beaucoup d'exagération, qu'il n'existe plus de finances locales, mais tout au plus une localisation des finances nationales.”
The two most striking phenomena of local government finance in recent decades are, first, the absolute increase in the amount of money disbursed by local governments, and second, the substantial expansion in the proportion of local government disbursements financed from intergovernmental transfers of funds—grants-in-aid, shared taxes, and various other devices by which money is shifted from one level of government to another.
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- Copyright © American Political Science Association 1953
References
1 See International City Managers Association, Municipal Year Book 1952 (Chicago, 1952)Google Scholar; U. S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Survey of City Government Finances in 1951 (Washington, 1952)Google Scholar.
2 Truman's, David B. chapter, “The Web of Relationships in the Administrative Process,” in The Governmental Process (New York, 1951)Google Scholar is especially illuminating on this latter point. Using as one example the conflict over the U. S. Department of Agriculture's attempts to carry on its newer activities in direct relationship with the farmer, rather than through the land grant colleges and their agricultural extension services, Truman analyzes not only the legislative but also the bureaucratic and interest group opposition to new administrative organization that threatens existing political relationships at the grass roots. This aspect of the power struggle is probably not the least consequential factor in Secretary Benson's program for the reorganization of the USDA.
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8 The popular success of recent attacks on the confidentiality of the names of public assistance recipients is fresh evidence on this point.
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15 Harry S. Mustard, op. cit., p. 116.
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17 U. S. House of Representatives, Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, 82nd Cong., 1st sess., Hearings on Local Public Health Units (Washington, 1951), p. 19Google Scholar.
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19 Department of Commerce, Bureau of Public Roads, Table RM-200. This is an annual tabulation; the data for 1952 upon which citations in the text were based have not yet been printed.
20 Ibid.
21 See testimony of Thomas H. McDonald, U. S. Commissioner of Public Roads, in U. S. House of Representatives, Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, 81st Cong., 1st sess., Study of Domestic Land and Water Transportation (Washington, 1951), pp. 927et seqGoogle Scholar.
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25 Council of State Governments, State-Local Relations (Chicago, 1946) points out, at p. 27Google Scholar: “In a number of states, for example, highway grants are not audited by state officials; funds received by counties ‘for maintenance and construction of roads’ are merged into general county funds and their expenditure for highway purposes is not assured.” On the general subject of diversion, see Council of State Governments, Federal Grants in Aid (Chicago, 1949), pp. 227–29Google Scholar.
28 Council of State Governments, The Forty Eight State School Systems (Chicago, 1949), pp. 99–101 and Table 44, p. 219Google Scholar.
27 The debate is handily summarized in Council of State Governments, Federal Grants in Aid (Chicago, 1949), pp. 41–50Google Scholar.
28 Council of State Governments, The Forty Eight State School Systems (Chicago, 1949), pp. 128–31 and Table 55, p. 231Google Scholar.
29 Ibid., Table 60, p. 236.
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