Publisher's Synopsis
America's government has become top-heavy and is starting to display stress fractures. Crushing social spending is driving massive public debt. Civil debate is replaced by shrill emotional attacks. Citizens are losing faith in a federal government with seemingly no limit on its power. Agreement on the common good is no longer agreed upon. America's problems are clear, but the solutions are not. Locally Grown: The Art of Sustainable Government re-introduces us to America's bottom-up constitutional design and its power to make government more responsive, holistic and sustainable.
Author Jim Fini combines our constitutional limits on federal power with the concept of sustainability as the guiding principles for determining the size and scope of government. After all, what good are promises that cannot be kept? Our political leaders have already made too many of these. Lots of the problems that plague our nation can be addressed by crowd sourcing to our twenty thousand state and municipal laboratories who are better positioned to find solutions than federal bureaucrats and their "one-size-fits-all" mindset. Our collective tax dollars should go to fund the most effective solutions.
This book celebrates that life is richer and healthier when lived more locally. Just as local production of food is more transparent because we can visit nearby farms, so can localized government provide better quality and accountability than faraway Washington, DC. Locally Grown is a way of governing that respects diversity and freedom while acting as a natural immune system against the political viruses that plague our overly federalized country. Restoring the proper balance between our three levels of government is like the Marshall Plan and New Deal combined. There will be plenty of challenges. But getting it right will usher in a new era of sustainable, more equally distributed American prosperity.
