In France at least, there is pretty heavy redistribution between municipalities, supervised by the national level. This is why a country village could run a decent school, by the way : half of the municipal budget is subsidy. What I'm suggesting, I suppose, is that the parish level should be resourced according to population (rather than ability to levy property taxes). More widely, local-level democracy as a community-building tool.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}