The challenge of government is not fundamentally its cost, but its complexity, intractability, and most concerning of all its use of authority not as representative of residents but as self-interested action contrary to representation.
A small rural town of fifteen-thousand, and it’s 289 pages just to list the town’s annual budget.
There’s an anecdote about a former politician’s view of representation in Whitewater that’s telling. Once asked if he felt an obligation to support the views of his constituents, he scoffed at the very thought of it. He insisted that if those who elected him felt disappointed they could simply try to remove him from office. He felt no obligation to represent them; he declared he was in office to express his own views.
That’s too funny, really: a town squire so very sure of himself, but apparently simultaneously ignorant of public choice theory, or too dense to see that he was a walking expression of numerous economists’ prize-winning analyses within that field.
Here’s the proposed 2015 City of Whitewater budget: