There were a few large cities in the United States in the 19th century,but the nation was largely agricultural, and towns were the basic unitof government. Then rural Americans left their farms and small townsby the millions for better jobs, and the 20th century became the era ofbig cities.
Now Americans are on the move again, often outof cities into adjacent suburbs and far into the countryside to distantsubdivisions and booming regional cities. We are becoming a nation ofhuge metropolitan clusters.
Yet, as retired Americanbroadcast legend Tom Brokaw points out in a recent article, the small, local government units inside those clusters -police and fire departments, school and library systems, water andsewer boards, planning agencies and so forth - remain. Even sparselysettled rural states like Brokaw's native South Dakota support dozensof independent state universities rather than centralizing operationsunder a single entity.
He notes that the relatively small,[145,000-square-kilometer or 56,000-square-mile] neighboring state ofIowa maintains 99 separate county governments and therefore 99 countybureaucracies. And Brokaw believes that a large state like New Yorkcould save its residents more than a billion dollars a year byconsolidating some of its more than 10,000 separate government entities.
Such ideas never get very far, however. Efforts to createmega-government units - no matter how much more efficiently they mightrun - are vigorously opposed by government workers, police,firefighters and their unions. Politicians do not agitate these peopleif they want to get re-elected.
And lots of other Americanslike their small, hometown government agencies. They feel that theycan keep a closer eye on them and have greater influence overgovernment affairs than they would over some mammoth bureaucracy faraway. As one Florida resident wrote the , "Sometimes inefficiencyis the price we pay for democracy."