Let's Get Horizontal.



Let’s Get Horizontal.  Can we not just apply this general principle of our private lives to our government?  Do our beaurucrats simply fail to grasp the common wisdom of the horizontal over the vertical?  I don’t know about that, but I do know this: if our government gets much more vertical, the moon will be in jeopardy of being poked.

It is not reasonable to expect that government can operate without a certain amount of inefficiency and lack of empathy.  By its very nature, government will always duplicate, waste, and be out of touch with its citizenry…to a certain degree.  The amount of that degree is where the focus needs to be.  And that begs the question: Which form of government structure keeps that degree to a minimum, vertical or horizontal?  How you view this question and which you deem to be the proper response speaks a good deal about whether you are a conservative or a liberal.

In the last six years, we have seen a massive amount of vertical integration in our government; and it is fair to say that process is likely to continue on an accelerating path over the next two and a half years.  More and more, whether you are in or out of the government, we are seeing less autonomy, less decision making, and less substantive input at the local level and more of all this power and authority flowing upwards to the federal level.  Now without a doubt, there are instances where a federal dictate is necessary for the purposes of uniformity in implementation and maintenance.  But it also true that the closer government resides to the people, the more reflective and responsive it will be to their concerns and desires. 

The nanny state environment sought by today’s liberal establishment requires vertical integration of government.  It requires that your local federal representatives rely on their central state office for marching orders; and that those state federal offices rely on their WDC department officials for their marching orders.  This type of setup permits WDC to keep the maximum amount of program administration directly under their thumb and under their control.  It effectively removes the discretionary authority of local officials that, while on occasion is clearly abused and corrupted, allows our government to relate and respond to the voters and allows our government to serve our vast and diverse populace in a fair and equitable manner.

When political parties argue about limited government, the emphasis is almost always placed on WDC.  Sometimes it bleeds down to the regulatory impacts at the state level.  But rarely do we broaden the discussion enough to encompass the question of the vertical versus the horizontal.  Whether you choose to support a limited government or an expanded government, it only makes sense that you support a horizontal government.  The more autonomy that is exercised by your local government officials makes the policy exercised by those people more accessible to you.  We all feel estranged from our government and that leads to voter apathy and disillusionment.  If we are to be involved with our democracy, we need to be within grasp of our government; we need to be able to reach out and touch our government.  And if we are fortunate enough to actually find that government representative to reach out and touch, they need to be sufficiently empowered to respond in a meaningful way to our questions, concerns, and desires.  You can get into trouble, serious trouble, with both the vertical and the horizontal.  But at the end of the day, don’t we all know that getting horizontal is the only way to roll?