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It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and
responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every
act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its
operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its
agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and
loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the
beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent
men. – Henry L. Mencken, 1926.
In the United States at the present time, the principal
...increase of State power ... point to ... the centralization of
State authority.... Practically all the sovereign rights and powers of the
smaller political units ... have been absorbed by the federal unit.... State
power has not only been thus concentrated at Washington, but it has been so
far concentrated into the hands of the Executive that the existing regime is
a regime of personal government ....
The pressure of centralization has
tended powerfully to convert every official and every political aspirant in
the smaller units into a[n] ... agent of the federal bureaucracy. This
presents an interesting parallel with the state of things prevailing in the
Roman Empire in the last days of the Flavian dynasty, and afterwards. The
rights and practices of local self-government, which were formerly very
considerable in the provinces and much more so in the municipalities, were
lost by surrender rather than by suppression. The imperial bureaucracy,
which up to the second century was comparatively a modest affair, grew
rapidly to great size, and local politicians were quick to see the advantage
of being on terms with it. They came to Rome with their hats in their hands,
as governors, Congressional aspirants and such-like now go to Washington.
–
Albert J. Nock , 1935 |
