> I think that best government is least government;
The problem with this view is that government is the way that we - as a society - make collective decisions about the rules and norms under which we want to live, as well as the way we build programs to serve the public good and achieve things that we want to achieve together.
If you make that process - the process of deciding rules and norms - so painstaking slow, and the process of enforcing the rules nearly impossible, then what you end up with is a society with out rules or norms. Which isn't a society. Or with rules and norms locked down and frozen, unable to adjust to the changing needs of the society.
What we need is a government that is as responsive to the needs and wants of the governed as possible.
Usually the way you achieve that is through various forms of democracies, but those are prone to tyrannies of the majority - in which a majority intentionally choose to oppress various minorities. So the trick is to have a super-responsive Democracy that also has safeguards in place to protect the minority from the majority.
And there in lies the rub, what those safeguards should be is the never ending debate.
But "best government is least government" is a truly toxic and self-destructive meme that has badly infected US culture. If you want to understand what you're actually saying with that sentence, s/government/civilization/g. Government is simply the mechanism through which we collectively build our civilization.
> The problem with this view is that government is the way that we - as a society - make collective decisions about the rules and norms under which we want to live, as well as the way we build programs to serve the public good and achieve things that we want to achieve together.
There's nothing in what you wrote there that can't be and isn't done in the private spheres. Making "collective decisions about the rules and norms under which we want to live"? That's part of any culture, and often happens by social processes in which government is irrelevant. And charitable organizations — or "programs to serve the public good" — have a long and successful history of outdoing government at actually helping people in need. Finally, business and social organizations "achieve things that we want to achieve together" in a way that doesn't involve government coercion.
You suggest we can "s/government/civilization/g", but I'd say you have it backwards, if you value people working together willingly to accomplish great things for each other.
> There's nothing in what you wrote there that can't be and isn't done in the private spheres.
There are many things which the private sphere cannot do, and other things which it could do in theory but has utterly failed at in practice. The obvious things it cannot do in theory or practice are set laws - the rules we all must live by whether we want to or not. Things like you don't get to murder other people on a whim. That is no something the private sector can enforce, and if you argue that society could simply enforce that through the majority exiling people who commit those sort of crimes - what you are describing is government, in its most primitive form. The private sector cannot handle this - not even in theory.
As for things the private sector could handle in theory, but has utterly failed at in practice, health care is an obvious one. If you compare the places where the government handles health care as a private good well to places where health care is handled by the private sector, the private sector has not outperformed the government - anywhere.
It really boils down to this: not everything can be voluntary in a society. Some rules have to be set, and enforced by everyone with no opt out. We can debate endlessly about exactly which set of rules should be included in that, but there's a minimal set (don't kill, don't steal, etc) that almost everyone can agree on. The process of agreeing upon those rules and enforcing them is, by definition, government. And having those rules exist and enforced is, by definition, civilization.
I'm with you on paragraphs one and three — there is a minimum government below which, if it didn't exist, it would arise spontaneously. Paragraph two, well, I'd like to see this country where a reasonably undistorted private sector provides healthcare. Certainly no such thing exists in the United States, where every subsector of the healthcare and insurance industries is regulated beyond any sort of fair competition.
No such thing exists anywhere. Almost every country on the planet provides some sort of public health care. And any country that doesn't, one could argue the private sector health care is distorted.
This is because it is impossible to provide private health care in an undistorted market. A patient can often cannot "shop around" for health care. It can never be a truly voluntary exchange when one party's health is on the line. There will always be an significant element of coercion and urgency for the party needing care. This is especially true of emergency and urgent care, but is true to varying degrees for most forms of health care.
I like most of your post, but I think your last paragraph is wrong. The government is not the civilization. It is one of the ways we collectively build our civilization, but far from the only one. Government is essential - anarchy does not build great civilizations - and it has been the foundation of building western civilization. It was the foundation by being limited - by not doing everything, by letting people and companies do most of the building.
> But "best government is least government" is a truly toxic and self-destructive meme that has badly infected US culture. If you want to understand what you're actually saying with that sentence, s/government/civilization/g. Government is simply the mechanism through which we collectively build our civilization.
Now that our civilization is built, we don't need armies of elected politicians or long-term, unelected functionaries controlling the society or ourselves.
It's worth comparing the way the Constitution is amended in Hungary and the USA. In Hungary the process is too fast, in the USA the process is too slow. There must be a sweet spot, in-between these two countries:
The problem with this view is that government is the way that we - as a society - make collective decisions about the rules and norms under which we want to live, as well as the way we build programs to serve the public good and achieve things that we want to achieve together.
If you make that process - the process of deciding rules and norms - so painstaking slow, and the process of enforcing the rules nearly impossible, then what you end up with is a society with out rules or norms. Which isn't a society. Or with rules and norms locked down and frozen, unable to adjust to the changing needs of the society.
What we need is a government that is as responsive to the needs and wants of the governed as possible.
Usually the way you achieve that is through various forms of democracies, but those are prone to tyrannies of the majority - in which a majority intentionally choose to oppress various minorities. So the trick is to have a super-responsive Democracy that also has safeguards in place to protect the minority from the majority.
And there in lies the rub, what those safeguards should be is the never ending debate.
But "best government is least government" is a truly toxic and self-destructive meme that has badly infected US culture. If you want to understand what you're actually saying with that sentence, s/government/civilization/g. Government is simply the mechanism through which we collectively build our civilization.