I have said for years that the best government is the one closest to home. Washington is a long way off. The people there have never driven our roads or paid our light bills, and they have no business telling a Texan how to live. I still believe every word of that.
But I have come to a refinement, and I want to share it. Close to home is good. Too close to home is a different matter. When the government is your city council, you run into it at the grocery store. You know the councilman’s wife. You know he got a little loud at the ballgame last fall. It is hard to respect an authority that lives a few streets over.
That is why I was glad when the state passed a law that lets it set aside many of the ordinances our cities make. Some of these were small things, like local rules about giving water breaks to men working construction in the heat. I am sure the council members who passed them meant well. But meaning well is not the same as seeing the whole picture, and the whole picture can only be seen from Austin.
Think of it the way you think of a family. A father makes the rules of the house. When the children are grown and have houses of their own, a lesser kind of man would let them make their own rules. A stronger kind keeps a key and comes by on Sundays to check the thermostat. The children may grumble. They will thank him later, or they will not, and either way the house stays at a sensible temperature.
A fellow at the feed store asked me whether this was not exactly what we complain about when Washington does it to Texas. I told him no, because Washington is wrong and Austin is right. He said that sounded like it depended on who was in charge. I told him most things do.
I will go one step further. I do not see why the principle has to stop at the city limits. If the state knows better than the city, it stands to reason it knows better than the county, the school board, the water district and the volunteer fire department. I would not mind if it had a word with my homeowners’ association while it was at it.
People talk about self-government as if it were the point of the whole country. I think the point is good government, and good government is whatever the right people decide from a comfortable distance. Distance gives a man perspective. It also keeps him from having to look anybody in the eye. I’ll be voting for my party’s man for the Senate this fall to keep that distance right where it is. The other fellow seems to think a town ought to be able to write its own rules again, and I would rather the rules kept coming from Austin.
I have always believed in local control. I just never thought it should be left to the locals.
D. M.