Subsidiarity Is the Old Idea Behind Keeping Power as Close to Home as Possible

It is a long word for a simple thing, so let me begin with a pothole.

Picture a pothole on Maple Street. Who should fix it? Not the President, obviously. Not Congress, which has better things to do than patch asphalt. Probably not the state capital either, a hundred miles away, where nobody has driven down Maple Street in their lives. The person who knows about the pothole is the neighbour who hit it, the person who can fix it cheaply is the town's public works crew, and the person who can be thrown out if he ignores it is the town councilman who lives two blocks over.

Nobody needed a political philosopher to reach that answer. Ordinary people understand it instinctively. The problem is that Washington often does not behave as if it did. The political vocabulary for this instinct is subsidiarity, and it is one of the oldest and most useful ideas in the conservative toolbox. It is the reason we say "keep power local," and it is a better reason than "because we like states."

What the word means

Subsidiarity says that decisions should be made at the lowest level that can competently make them. The family decides what it can. The neighbourhood, the congregation, the school board, the town handle what the family cannot. The county and the state take what is beyond them. The nation takes only what nothing smaller can do. Each higher level exists to help the lower ones, not to replace them. The Latin root, subsidium, means help or support, and that's the sense: a higher authority is a back-up for the lower, not its master.

The idea is often credited to Catholic social teaching. In 1931, Pope Pius XI, in the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, stated it in the form the world has used ever since: it is an injustice, a grave evil and a disturbance of right order to take away from smaller and lower organisations what they can do for themselves and give it to a larger and higher one. You do not have to be Catholic to see the sense in that. Dutch Calvinists reached a similar idea, which Abraham Kuyper called "sphere sovereignty," and the American founders reached it by a different road. Bad ideas rarely turn up in so many traditions at once.

I would put the argument this way, in four steps.

1. Knowledge is local. The person closest to a problem knows the most about it. A distant official has to rely on reports, rules and averages. That is the same knowledge problem that Hayek identified, and Hayek Explained Why the Smartest Planner in the Room Always Loses explains it.
2. Accountability is local. You can find your school board member at the grocery store. You cannot find your senator at the grocery store. The closer the decision-maker, the easier it is to hold him responsible.
3. Mistakes are local. When a town gets a decision wrong, the damage stays in the town, and the next town can learn from it. When Washington gets one wrong, fifty states live with it at once.
4. Freedom is local. If you dislike the rules in your town, you can organise, run for office, or move. If you dislike a national rule, your options are narrower.

The Founders knew it by another name

The word did not exist in the eighteenth century, but the American framers built the idea into the Constitution.

The Tenth Amendment (1791) says: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." That last clause matters. The people are listed alongside the states. The amendment does not just divide power between two governments; it reserves what is left to the citizens themselves.

Federalist No. 46, written by James Madison, reasons about the relationship of the federal and state governments. Madison describes them as different agents and trustees of the people, with different powers for different purposes, and he argues that the people's first attachment would naturally be to their state governments, which would make it unlikely that the federal government could swallow them up. His expectation, in other words, was that power would stay close to home because that is where people's loyalty lies. Whether the prediction held up is a question worth debating.

The enumerated powers do the rest. Article I, Section 8 lists what Congress can do. Everything not on the list is, by default, someone else's job.

And the idea is stronger than a legal doctrine. Tocqueville, visiting in the 1830s, saw it in the way Americans handled their own affairs in townships and associations before reaching for the state.

Rungs on the ladder: family to nation

Let me walk up the ladder with concrete examples, because the best way to understand subsidiarity is to watch it work.

The family. It decides how a child is raised, what he is taught about right and wrong, and what he eats for dinner. The Supreme Court has recognised parents' primary role in cases such as Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925); Meyer, Pierce, Yoder and Troxel Prove the Constitution Puts Parents First covers that line of cases.

The town and the school. Education is the standard example. The Constitution does not mention schools, and for most of American history they have been run by local boards answerable to local voters. The people who set the curriculum are your neighbours, and you can show up at a meeting and tell them what you think. The Constitution Never Mentions Schools and That Is the Whole Point explains why that was no accident.

Roads. Maple Street's pothole is a town matter. The county road is a county matter. The state highway is a state matter. The Interstate Highway System, authorised by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, is a case where a higher level took on a task because it crossed every state line and served national commerce and defence, and conservatives have generally accepted that role. Even then, the states build and maintain much of the system.

Policing. Most policing is done by city police and county sheriffs, who answer to local officials and local voters. That is a deliberate feature of our system. The federal government has its own law enforcement agencies for federal crimes, such as counterfeiting, interstate trafficking and offences against federal property, but it does not run your neighbourhood patrol. A sheriff is elected by the county he serves, which is subsidiarity in a badge.

The state. The state handles what a town cannot: a state court system, state universities, licensing, a state budget. The states are, in the phrase Justice Louis Brandeis made famous in 1932, laboratories of democracy, and Brandeis Called the States Laboratories and Conservatives Took Him at His Word explains how conservatives picked up the idea.

The nation. The nation does what only a nation can. And that brings me to the part of the argument where honesty is required.

When a higher level must act

Subsidiarity is not a slogan for "local is always better." The principle, rightly understood, has a second half. The higher level should act when the lower cannot, and there are real cases. The Founders knew it, which is why they built the Constitution to have a national government with real powers at all, in place of the weak Articles of Confederation. Here are the clear cases.

1. National defence. No town, and no state, can defend the country against a foreign enemy. This is a classic public good, and the Preamble puts "provide for the common defence" among the reasons for the Constitution.
2. Disputes between states. When one state's actions harm another, no state can settle the quarrel as a judge in its own cause. The Constitution gives federal courts jurisdiction over controversies between states, and the Commerce Clause lets Congress keep trade among the states free of local barriers.
3. Constitutional rights. Here is the place where honesty about our own history matters most. If a state denies a citizen a right the Constitution guarantees, the remedy is not to wait for the state to reform itself. The Reconstruction Amendments, adopted in 1865, 1868 and 1870, gave the national government the power to enforce basic rights against the states, and the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) held that segregated public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Conservatives who invoke "states' rights" without facing the fact that the phrase was used to defend Jim Crow are not helping our case. The principle is that rights come first, and that local control operates inside the limits those rights set. Citizenship, Equal Protection and the Ballot in the 14th and 15th Amendments describes the amendments.
4. Problems that cross the lines. Some matters, such as a pollutant that drifts across a border or a river that flows through several states, cannot be solved by any single state. That is where the higher level is not a usurper but a necessary partner, though even there the best arrangement often leaves implementation to the lower level.

So the test for any proposed national action is not "do I like the outcome?" It is "is this something that only the national level can do?" If not, subsidiarity says leave it where it is.

The courts and the principle

The Supreme Court has enforced a version of this idea, in a limited way. In New York v. United States (1992) and Printz v. United States (1997), the Court held that the federal government may not commandeer state governments to carry out federal programs, which is to say Congress cannot simply order state officials to do its work. In South Dakota v. Dole (1987), the Court allowed Congress to attach conditions to federal money, which is a different tool; The Drinking Age Story Shows How Washington Buys Control of the States explains the problem of federal strings. And The Tenth Amendment Rule That Protects Red States Also Protects Sanctuary Cities looks at how the anti-commandeering rule cuts in more than one political direction, which is exactly what you would expect from a principle and not a partisan weapon.

That last point is worth stressing. A principle you invoke only when your side is out of power is a tactic, not a principle. Subsidiarity has to hold both ways. If we believe in keeping power local when Washington is run by the other party, we have to believe it when Washington is run by ours, and when our own governors want to override a city. Why Your City Can't Do That, Dillon's Rule and Home Rule Explained shows that even inside a state, the question of which level should decide can be fought out between the statehouse and city hall.

Subsidiarity at work in the states

Since this post sits under the heading of the Republican governors, a word about what the principle means for a statehouse. A governor who believes in subsidiarity asks two questions of every initiative. When the state is tempted to impose a uniform rule on every school district, county and city, he asks whether the problem really requires one answer. And when Washington sends down a mandate, he asks whether it belongs to the state or to his own constituents. What a Governor Can Actually Do and What Only the Legislature Can describes the powers a governor actually has, and Three Towns, Three Rule Books and the Case for Letting States Differ shows what happens when towns go their own way.

A hypothetical may help. Suppose three towns in the same state face the same problem: crowded schools. Town A builds a new school. Town B lets families use a share of the education budget to choose among schools. Town C changes its zoning to allow more housing, easing the crowding by letting the district grow gradually. Within five years, the state has three experiments, and parents everywhere can look at the results. If the state had imposed Town A's answer on all three, there would be one experiment and no comparison. That is the scientific case for subsidiarity: it lets us learn.

The strongest objection

The objection runs: "Subsidiarity sounds appealing, but local governments can be corrupt, small-minded and incompetent. A national rule at least sets a floor. Why should a child's chances depend on which town she lives in?"

It is a fair challenge, and the first part of the answer is that local governments do fail, as all governments do. The remedy is accountability, transparency and competition among jurisdictions, and where a local government violates the Constitution, the rights-based exceptions I described above apply. The second part is that a national floor has costs too. A single national rule is a single national mistake, and the one-size-fits-all fix often fits no one. The third part is that a child's chances already depend on where she lives, and the answer is not to disempower the people closest to her, but to give her family more options, which is why school choice matters so much.

The bottom line

• Subsidiarity means decisions belong at the lowest level that can handle them: family, then town, then state, then nation, with each higher level helping the lower and not replacing it.
• The idea appears in Pius XI's Quadragesimo Anno (1931), in the Tenth Amendment and in Madison's Federalist No. 46, and the reasons are the same everywhere: local knowledge, local accountability, local mistakes and local freedom.
• Higher levels must act for national defence, disputes between states, constitutional rights and problems that cross borders. "Local control" never overrides a constitutional right.
• Apply the principle both ways. If you want Washington to leave your state alone, be ready to leave your town alone when your own statehouse is tempted to override it.
• Next time a mandate arrives, ask: could a smaller unit have handled this? Then say so at the school board, the city council and the legislature, where your voice carries furthest.