Centralization of government services?

I like Tom Brokaw, but in his op-ed piece in Sunday's New York Times (Small-Town Big Spending), he got it backwards. The piece is about what he sees as the redundancies of government services and structures:

Yet Iowa proudly maintains its grid of 99 counties, each with its own distinctive courthouse, many on the National Register of Historic Places -- and some as little as 40 miles away from one another. Each one houses a full complement of clerks, auditors, sheriff's deputies, jailers and commissioners. Is there any reason beyond local pride to maintain such duplication given the economic and population pressures of our time?

This is not a problem unique to the states I have cited. Every state and every region in the country is stuck with some form of anachronistic and expensive local government structure that dates to horse-drawn wagons, family farms and small-town convenience.

If this is a reset, it's time to reorganize our state and local government structures for today's realities rather than cling to the sensibilities of the 20th century.

But the centralization of government structures -- based on economies of scale -- which he advocates is exactly the hallmark of the Industrial Age of the 20th Century. The 21st Century - and the I-Cubed Economy -- will be one of decentralization and localized services, connected in a vast network. Some government services will likely benefit form consolidation on the network. I am betting, however, that there will still be a need for local governmental structures geared toward the crafting of localized solution (sometimes tweaks of generalized best practices) to localized problems.