What is a Government?

I’ve been thinking about this subject for a while, and I mentioned some of my thoughts on it to my mom, who encouraged me to put them down in a blog.

So, here we go. What is a government?

Well, basically, when a large enough group of people get together, they need to agree on certain things, and there are certain administrative functions that need to be agreed upon as a group. They need to agree on the rules for the group (laws), what will happen if somebody is harmful to the group (law enforcement), creation and maintenance of roads, what object represents money, and how to defend the group from nature or other groups. And on top of that, there needs to be some organization that coordinates these various different functions so that they work together and any conflicts between them can be handled.

Essentially, this is what a government is–it is a collection of administrative organizations, coordinated by an executive organization. It’s not “the people in charge of us.” There’s no such thing as “the people in charge of us.” This isn’t a slave state–nobody’s telling me what to do with my life, every day. That’s what would be happening if the government was “the people in charge of us.” No, the government is a very boring, loosely organized series of administrative organizations.

The reason it all has to be one organization is that “The Money Organization” and “The Defense Organization”, if set up separately, would overpower the other organizations. So “The Law-Making Organization” has to be a part of it to keep those in check.

Politicians promising people personal prosperity is like running for class president and promising everybody good grades. The class president isn’t responsible for your grades, so it’s all just pie in the sky. He could certainly make rules that would make it difficult for you to make good grades, but the grades themselves are a matter of your personal motivation and work, not something magical which you will be gifted from on high.

Similarly, a politician could certainly hinder personal prosperity with laws, or remove past hinderances to prosperity, but improving personal prosperity has nothing to do with the government, which manages laws, enforcement, roads, printing money, and defense. The government will never eliminate poverty, because the government has nothing to do with poverty.

A government structure that did attempt to control the entire economy and thus “eliminate poverty”–communism–instead created poverty for everybody. Essentially they added “The Economy Organization” to the list of organizations, and that was a bad idea, since obviously people do better when self-motivated, not when commanded from on high. (Witness the low productivity of slavery.)

Anyhow, this model of government (a bunch of separate organizations coordinated by an executive organization) seems to simplify and resolve all of the problems of government that I have been thinking about for many years, so it seems like a good model to me. The various political methodologies then become merely methods of ensuring continued sane leaders in The Executive Organization and sane people in the other organizations (such as sane law-makers).

-Max