The proper role of government is...
Posted by mminnick 8 years, 7 months ago to Philosophy
"The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence— to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. I will not attempt, in a brief lecture, to discuss the political theory of Objectivism."
Rand, Ayn. The Virtue of Selfishness (p. 24). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
To the point of a poet by GaltsGulch
Rand, Ayn. The Virtue of Selfishness (p. 24). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
To the point of a poet by GaltsGulch
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Good clarification.
One of my life-long "problems" is that I don't nod knowingly in order to conceal my ignorance.
I agree, that protecting individual property rights is a main role of government.
I note that some functions will not be developed by straight involuntary capitalism. (e.g. the military and roads).
I argue that capitalism will aggressively find the optimum, but it will often be a local optimum, local to the subject, and much better, larger scope optima exist.
In those cases, like the military, we need the government, or other large voluntary group to support such a thing, like the interstate system.
Is this still too full of technobabble? I get mired in it sometimes.
The knot in all our discussion is that it's not a perfect world, never was, and likely, never will be. Therefore, laws must be made with as much rationality as possible using the most rational people available. No easy task.
To take the most mundane example: how does "anarcho-capitalism" handle window breaking? If you don't punish people for breaking windows, you're going to see some window-breaking. Now: the property owners can keep spending scads of money replacing broken windows when they could be spending time, money and effort on other things, or they could take counsel together and make a rule--with force to back it up--that he who breaks a window, pays for what he did in some way and by some measure.
And then you come to the question of "did you get the right guy," or how much punishment fits the crime. Ah, that's where government comes in. It needs police power, military power, and judicial power--and should separate the three. To that, add the power of lawmaking and keep that separate from the rest, too.
It's one thing to argue that the government shouldn't be doing anything else. It's another to argue that the government should not exist.
We know many examples of private police operating within the context of uniform (government) laws. The security forces of General Motors and Ford Motor Company faced each other every day across close neighborhoods and never fired on each other. Today, G4S (HQ in London) and Securitas (HQ in Stockholm) each has about 300,000 employees in about 30 nations, and again, adhering to the laws of those nations do not attack each other.
Similarly, the American Arbitration Association is famous. Read almost any contract you have for your mortgage, car, or glass wire. As a writer, I know them from contracts with publishers. But don't stop there. Look in Yelp for arbitration in your own town. Many law firms offer it, often under contract to government courts of law.
Government remains the foundational institution of law. How that gets done is open to human action.
The word "police" appears nowhere in the US Constitution. The first civic police force, the London Metropolitan, was a consequence (not a cause) of the industrial revolution -- and it served a city, not a nation.
Most Objectivists (as well as libertarians and conservatives) will say that this means police forces, military, and courts of law. In "Galt's Speech", Rand wrote: "The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law."