Letters to the Editor Regionalization is Exactly Wrong By James Ostrowski Jul 28, 2004, 10:24 Email this article  Printer friendly page I attended Kevin Gaughan’s program—“For a Greater Buffalo”—downtown today and have this reaction. As I explain in my book, Political Class Dismissed, the decline of Buffalo, by which I mean the Buffalo area, is the result of the huge amount of wealth siphoned off by the political class. Gaughan’s proposal of county government does nothing to solve the problem. The main costs of state and local government are transfer payments. Payments for being poor, needing medical care, and being a public school teacher or administrator. Consolidation does very little to reduce these costs. Centralization will, on the other hand, reduce competition between local governments to keep taxes low. Centralization will also remove power ever further from the people. Democracy, as originally pertaining to Athens, with a small population, only works at the neighborhood or village level. Larger governmental units tend to be swallowed up by political machines and special interests. If we look at two governments that are already centralized—and “streamlined”—the State and the Feds, what do you see? Huge, distant, unresponsive and corrupt monsters that consume far greater tax receipts per capita than the worst local government—Buffalo’s. I like Kevin Gaughan. He’s independent and his heart is in the right place. He is not a tool of the bad guys, as far as I can tell. Unfortunately, his solution has no basis in theory, fact, or history. The truth is, we need to decentralize. Bring political power back to the organic communities in which we live. The most perfect form of decentralization, of course, is individual freedom. Centralization or regionalization or consolidation is exactly wrong. A good barometer for judging ideas is: “Is the local power elite for it?” They’re almost always wrong. They support centralization of power; theirs! © Copyright 2023 - Speakupwny.com hosted by Online Media, Inc Buffalo Web Design and Web Hosting Top of Page

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