ABSTRACT
We have argued (Chapter XV, p. 237) that a governmental control plan must be treated as a single entity, since there must be some mechanism for making a single balanced judgement of the social value of any change in a control, when all the different effects of that control are taken into account. Yet modern government is such a vast affair that there must necessarily be some decentralization of operations among a large number of different governmental agencies and departments. No single department could run the police, education, old age pensioners, road-building and defence to mention a few of the fields in which governmental policies must be determined. Can decentralization be made compatible with the formulation of a single coherent governmental control plan?
