Editorial: Worth repeating
President Roosevelt was once Governor of New York. During that period, he was confronted with a proposal for expansion of state powers at the expense of local control of local affairs. This is what he had to say about that proposition:
I cite this as an illustration of the present dangerous tendency to forget a fundamental of American democracy, which rests on the right of a locality to manage its own local affairs; the tendency to encourage concentration of power at the top of a governmental structure, alien to our system and more closely akin to a dictatorship or the central committee of a Communist regime. We have met difficulties before this, and have solved them in accordance with the basic theories of representative democracy. Let us not now pursue the easy road of centralization of authority, lest some day we discover too late that our liberties have disappeared.
Brother, you can say that again!