Decentralization of Power Quotes

The federal government should be less important in our lives, not more.

In the United States the government has become less important. So, it's democracy, but as each year passes it seems that the government plays less of a role in people's lives, and so they're living in whatever situation their employment imposes upon them more than they're living in a grand political system.

Anarchists try to identify power structures. They urge those exercising power to justify themselves. This justification does not succeed most of the time.

I do think if we take the power out of Washington and bring it back to the people, if we defend the Bill of Rights, free speech, religious liberty, the Second Amendment, privacy, if we repeal Obamacare, abolish the IRS, if we get Washington out of the way of job creators, I think we can transform this country.

Government power must be dispersed. If government is to exercise power, better in the county than in the state, better in the state than in Washington. If I do not like what my local community does, be it in sewage disposal, or zoning, or schools, I can move to another local community, and though few may take this step, the mere possibility acts as a check. If I do not like what Washington imposes, I have few alternatives in this world of jealous nations.

Taking legislative authority away from the federal government doesn't necessarily mean freer individuals. It might just mean granting vastly more authority to the states--which already have far broader police powers than most of us would care to admit.

Were not cutting the budget simply for the sake of sounder financial management. This is only a first step toward returning power to the states and communities, only a first step toward reordering the relationship between citizen and government.

He's [Louis Brandais] so suspicious of bigness in government as well as business that he mistrusts even really top-down reforms at the state level. The most inspiring part of his legacy to me is his belief in the imperative and duty of self-education on behalf of citizens.

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

There were 16 people in the race, including a number of governors, and there's only one left. And I think that at the end we have to make sure that we have somebody that can go to that town, change that system, grow employment, change the whole way in which it works and ship power money and influence back to the states. So I'm optimistic about it.

I firmly believe that the army of persons who urge greater and greater centralization of authority and greater and greater dependence upon the Federal Treasury are really more dangerous to our form of government than any external threat that can possibly be arrayed against us.

If Rome gets to decide everything for the north and for the south, it's not a good and just thing.

One of the signs that things are going reasonably well for democracy is that we have the states where they're closer to the people. Federalism is a strength. We have all of these civil society institutions - civil society is a very important hallmark of democracy.

Whenever a Republican gets in office, all of a sudden progressives realize that federalism and state's rights aren't necessarily only about defending slavery or Jim Crow. They're actually about maximizing freedom.

Whether Canada ends up with one national government or two governments or 10 governments, the Canadian people will require less government no matter what the constitutional status or arrangement of any future country may be.

The public affairs of the union are spread throughout a very extensive region, and are extremely diversified by the local affairs connected with them, and can with difficulty be learnt in any other place, than in the central councils, to which a knowledge of them will be brought by the representatives of every part of the empire. Yet some knowledge of the affairs, and even of the laws of all the states, ought to be possessed by the members from each of the states.

That's what I want to see, and that's what Trump is calling for, to take the power back from Washington, D.C.

Anarchism is that political philosophy which advocates the maximization of individual responsibility and the reduction of concentrated power regal, dictatorial, parliamentary: the institutions which go loosely by the name of "government" to a vanishing minimum.

People feel that the EU is a one-way process, a great machine that sucks up decision-making from national parliaments to the European level until everything is decided by the EU. That needs to change.

We’ve gotten in the habit over the last 40 years in thinking the government has the answers. There’s very little that government can do as efficiently and as economically as the people can do themselves.

If and when we get back to that solid, biblically and constitutionally based foundation in this country, America will be great - and America will be great again because we give people freedom, we dissolve power out of Washington.

We have seen an unprecedented dispersion of authority, such that 'a person like you' is now one of the most credible spokespersons on business, along with technical and academic experts.

Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government. Public servants at such a distance, and from under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance of distance, be unable to administer and overlook all the details necessary for the good government of the citizens; and the same circumstance, by rendering detection impossible to their constituents, will invite public agents to corruption, plunder and waste.

The primary threat to nature and people today comes from centralising and monopolising power and control. Not until diversity is made the logic of production will there be a chance for sustainability, justice and peace. Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative.