Albert Bushnell Hart Quotes

I happen to be one who believes very strongly that state and local governments have their proper roles.

Once one concedes that a single world government is not necessary, then where does one logically stop at the permissibility of separate states? If Canada and the United States can be separate nations without being denounced as in a state of impermissible ‘anarchy’, why may not the South secede from the United States? New York State from the Union? New York City from the state? Why may not Manhattan secede? Each neighbourhood? Each block? Each house? Each person?

I know people don't like America very much, but the one thing it's very good on is local government.

Devolution [decentralization of government] cannot stop at the State House. It must go down to City Hall.

In the space of just 18 months from 1999 to 2001, one of the world’s most centralized nations [Indonesia] burst apart to become one of its most decentralized.

The capacity of the commonwealth government created under the local constitution to exercise governmental powers in local affairs is like that of local government in the states of the union in regard to non-federal affairs at the local level.

I think it true that, you know, sometimes things start to change even before a government changes and, actually, I think you can begin to see even the Labour machine beginning to understand that it has become over-reliant on targets and processes, that local governments have been over-bossed and bullied.

Where there is only a national representative government without local self-government, there is no liberty as we understand it

Quite as serious an error [of the French] is the failure to provide for local self-government. As this lies at the bottom of republican institutions, and should be, moreover, the first concern of democracy

13 years after Indonesia began devolving power from the federal government to hundreds of sub provincial units, the link between local and national political interests have become extremely tenuous… although locally elected politicians may be delivering things that people want in their own back yards, they are not, collectively meeting the nation’s needs.

I hope that we increasingly shift power to local governments.

You can have very big local government. By big, I mean very engaged government. Do you measure it in terms of the number of laws? Number of employees? You could make arguments for either one. I tend to think the axis of the size of government is the wrong concern. But I do think that situating power more locally is a legitimate approach.

It would certainly be for the good of mankind to have all the mighty empires and monarchies of the world cantoned out into petty states and principalities.

The more responsibility you can move toward local government, the better of you're going to be … City governments do better than their State governments in terms of accountability.

Central government's such as Canada's have become too small to deal with the big global issues, yet they remain too large and distant to deal with problems of local control.

And let no one apply to the king in any suit, unless he at home may not be worthy of law, or cannot obtain law.

Each prince shall possess and exercise in peace according to the customs of the land the liberties, jurisdiction, and authority over counties

The enjoyment of civil rights, would be best and soonest obtained if every county in the land were made a little Commonwealth and their chief town a city, where the nobility and chief gentry may build houses or palaces, befitting their quality, may bear part in the government, make their own judicial laws and execute them by their elected judicatures without appeal in all things of civil government between man and man.

Perhaps democracy should be begun at the local level first. America was many local democracies before democracy came to the national level.

Modern administrative government springs from the inadequacy of a simple tripartite form of government to deal with modern problems …. It vests the necessary powers with the administrative authority it creates, not too greatly concerned with the extent to which such action does violence to the traditional tripartite theory of government organization.

Our whole history tells us that the national government has been far less corrupt and incompetent than state and local government … Time and time again the federal government has had to rescue people from the states and local governments. If we left it to the states, we would still have slavery.

With much care and skill power has been broken into fragments in the American township, so that the maximum possible number of people have some concern with public affairs.

Each county elector makes his own rules

The Empire is built up on free trade... your Empire is founded on the condition, and it could not have existed until now except on that condition, that every self-governing part of it shall have the right to work out its own prosperity by its own methods.

In Afghanistan, legitimate authority has been traditionally highly localized, a product of consensus rather than brute force, and firmly anchored in tribal, clannish, and kinship structures.