One of my favorite themes is the slowness and profoundness of structural change.  I was reminded of this in looking at my tax bill.  We pay a lot of county taxes and it makes me wonder what counties are good for.  They are sort of like middle management in the government hierarchy sitting between states and local communities. Now middle management has been under most pressure from the use of IT in companies.  Information reporting and aggregation up the chain is becoming easier, as is the dissemeniation of directives down the chain.  The same in theory should hold for government.  Yet, if anything, it appears that at least in our case the county budget has been growing faster than either the local or the state budget.  There may be a good reason for this that I am overlooking, but for now I consider counties vestiges from a time when it would have been hard for a state government to track what’s going on in all the municipalities.