What should government do?

[Garnet]

What should the government of a nation do? What responsibilities should belong to government and what responsibilities should belong to individual citizens?

[Caligulette]

Governments should provide for the common welfare - education, health care, economic safety net.

[Watser?]

Also: stuff like protecting citizens from natural disasters (floods, volcanoes, earthquakes etc.) as much as possible. Definitely not something you can leave to the market.

[Qingdai]

Safeguard the citizenry, from which they derive all power from.

[godfry n. glad]

Provide justice that is not 'just us rich folks'.

[godfry n. glad]

I would like to further delimit this discussion by focusing upon the separation of powers...

Which functions should be provided by national governments as versus more local ('state' governments in the US) regional and municipal governments.

I personally think that national government should stay the hell out of education, other than as an adjunct to their other services (like to military personnel family members). Other than assure integration, the national government involved in education has been a exemplar of why they should not be involved. In my view, governance of education should be at the most local level economically possible.

[mickthinks]

In effect you're asking for a definition of Utopia. Which is to say, it is not as simple a question as it looks.

[godfry n. glad]

The national government should be charged with protecting the sovereignty of the consumer by intervening in the market against entrenched interests dictating to the consumer. Trust-busting and acting to prevent monopolistic (and oligopolistic and kleptocratic) and predatory actions are also excellent roles for the national government.

[godfry n. glad]

Here's something I think the national government should NOT have the power to do:

Levy a national tax where the revenue raised is put into the hands of irresponsible elected officials under the influence of well-heeled private interests who twist them in to paying those revenues out to them. We don't need to be sending all that income to Washington, DC, just to be divvied up by the fat cats. Take the power of national tax away from the feds unless it is dedicated to a specific function which is clearly sunseted in the enabling legislation.

[1Samuel8]

Originally Posted by Garnet

What should the government of a nation do? What responsibilities should belong to government and what responsibilities should belong to individual citizens?

Forgive me, Garnet but the answers to your questions are irrelevent because you will never get a consensus. You will always and everywhere have dissenters to those answers. If those dissenters are stronger than you, you will find yourself somewhere along a continuum between peace and war.

Thus, it is more prudent to ask: "How do you want to see the arbitration of dissent between yourself and your dissenters handled?" By the way, I am not pretending that is an easy question to answer. It is not. The reason I point this out is because it changes the focus.

I do not believe that The Government is an acting agent that gives a damn about what should or should not be done for individual citizens. I think it is foolhardy to expect benevolent people to be in high office. I think The Government is a collection of people who seek to control other people under the guise of "helping" them.




ETA:

Originally Posted by godfry n. glad

Which functions should be provided by national governments as versus more local ('state' governments in the US) regional and municipal governments.

I think that line of thinking is wise -- although, I am not going to agree with your specifics. In general, devolving power and authority away from the federal state is the key.

Originally Posted by godfry n. glad

Provide justice that is not 'just us rich folks'.

Indeed. However, I want to point out: in our current state of affairs, we live under a monopoly on the provision of justice. The government and faceless bureaucrats control and monopolize justice.

How can justice be affordable and fair to the lower income folk?

In the long run, I think it is impossible. There are very few government monopolies that are able to deliver service at low cost. The poor will always be screwed in a monopolized justice system.

People must look at alternate dispute resolution and people have to start demanding that higher levels of legal authority be devolved. I mean take a look at that black car shit --- regardless of whether you agree with it or not, you have to admit that the cost of the legal system is bid upwards when parasitic lawyer-legislators devise stupid laws. Think of all the tax-payer dollars that were wasted coming up with that law!

Originally Posted by godfry n. glad

The national government should be charged with protecting the sovereignty of the consumer by intervening in the market against entrenched interests dictating to the consumer. Trust-busting and acting to prevent monopolistic (and oligopolistic and kleptocratic) and predatory actions are also excellent roles for the national government.

I think consumers can be shooting themselves in the foot with such demands.
The trouble is that acts of "trust-busting" can be a cover for predatory actions. For instance, if SupplierA can prove to his bureaucratic friends that SupplierB and SupplierC are colluding, breaking up them up into littleSupplierB1, littleSupplierB2, littleSupplierC1 and littleSupplierC2 is to SupplierA's advantage. SupplierA could have been a hell of a lot less efficient before but after the break up, he can supply because all of the costs of his competitors are now higher. His competitors can no longer take advantage of economies of scale.

[GodPossessed]

Government power is a hand grenade. It's great for destroying bad stuff, but innocent people are going to get hurt.

[Watser?]

So...

What makes you think government power is worse than, say, corporate power? At least there are some checks to government power.

[1Samuel8]

Originally Posted by Watser?

What makes you think government power is worse than, say, corporate power?

Why should you treat them any different?
Corporations get their "power" from government.

Originally Posted by Watser?

At least there are some checks to government power.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever makes you sleep better at night.

[Garnet]

By the way, y'all. I've been asked privately if I'm looking for any specific answers or if I have an underlying agenda. I'm not looking for any specific answers. The reason that I asked these questions is that I'm really curious about what people think that government should do. Someone asked me the same question and I kind of sat there with a deer in the headlights look and fumbled about for a bit. Maybe my underlying agenda is to figure out what my views are?

[Watser?]

Originally Posted by 1Samuel8

Why should you treat them any different?
Corporations get their "power" from government.

Where do you get this nonsense? And why do you 'answer' my question with the exact same question?

Originally Posted by 1Samuel8

Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever makes you sleep better at night.

As usual you have no arguments and come up with rhetoric then.

[1Samuel8]

Originally Posted by Watser?

Where do you get this nonsense?

From you. Why do you ask stupid irrelevent questions?

You were the first person to mention corporations in the thread.

Originally Posted by Garnet

Someone asked me the same question and I kind of sat there with a deer in the headlights look and fumbled about for a bit.

I think that is healthy because you may not need government.

I do not think government -- that includes their corporate friends and their corporate donors and their corporate influences -- should be doing anything.

[Dingfod]

You idyllic dreamers.

[Wonderbread Leotard]

Originally Posted by Dingfod

You idyllic dreamers.

The above is a low quality post.

[Dingfod]

Originally Posted by Sovereign

The above is a low quality post.

Fuck off and die, shithead.

[Master Taran]

Originally Posted by Dingfod

Fuck off and die, shithead.

You just HAD to quote the tard. Didn't you.

[livius drusus]

Originally Posted by Garnet

The reason that I asked these questions is that I'm really curious about what people think that government should do. Someone asked me the same question and I kind of sat there with a deer in the headlights look and fumbled about for a bit.

That's exactly what happened to me when I went to post in this thread. I was going to say something generic that I once heard Bill Maher say (government should do the things that individuals can't do, like standardization, building interstates, protecting the environment, etc.), but when I thought about it, I realized that simple statement doesn't even begin to address the complexities of modern statehood.

So I'm just going to read for a while instead of shooting my mouth off.

[Crumb]

I would say government should do the things that cannot be trusted to someone with a profit motive.

[1Samuel8]

Crumb,
Politicians, bureaucrats and government agents do not work for free.

[1Samuel8]

Originally Posted by Master Taran

You just HAD to quote the tard. Didn't you.

If he was going to quote something and force you to see a heinous piece of crap, I think you were lucky on that one.

[Wonderbread Leotard]

Government should gather intelligence conducive to advancing the national interest in the absolute sense and relative to competing interests. Government should provide authoritative leadership, organizational branches and institutions geared toward advancing the nation accordingly, both short-term and long-term, each of which it should continually update and integrate into the overall national strategy. The highest responsibility of the State should be to bring the national vision fully to fruition.

Some of the proper responsibilities of national government, stated more specifically:

Provide economic strategizing and implementation of strategies with the central principle undergirding all decisions being the furtherance of the national good.

Advancing the national interest on the most obviously military levels, as well. Integration of police, disaster control and military forces. All citizens shall be members of the national forces in some capacity.

Advancing the integration of female and male citizens by all means available, including developing the means so as to make them ever more effective.

Providing comprehensive education: from the intellectual to the physical, the most fundamental to the most advanced, moral and martial training, political education, and so forth. Promote excellent role models. Demote incipient enemies of the public good to their proper place as early as possible, so that they can instead be utilized to advance the good they would have otherwise undermined. Properly, education is a lifelong endeavor and policy must proceed accordingly. Rather than undue focus on cramming students' heads with factoid after factoid in a mechanical fashion, concentrate on nurturing their intellectual curiosity and creativity. Nurture awareness of how each day and each subject fits together into the whole and how they are relevant to their lives as pre-citizens and citizens of the national State.

Provide instinctual outlets for the basest urges so that they do not fester, frustrated and repressed, obstructing the expression of the highest instincts such as altruistic dedication to the good of the in-group (nation). This will allow the policy of full gender integration to proceed without the dignity of the nation's females being debased. Uplifting the honor of the nation's women honors their men as well and uplifts the honor of the nation as a whole. Utilize would-be assaulters and obstructers of the national interest to instead serve it as part of the machinery of these instinctual outlets.

Provide health care for all citizens and pre-citizens.

Provide housing and recreational facilities for all citizens and pre-citizens.

Advanced prenatal care, screening and counseling must be provided by State-licensed physicians and caregivers. Protect and advance reproductive rights, including provision for birth control and abortion services, but also the right for a mother to give birth without personally having to care for the child. It is the responsibility of sound government to institute and advance a national system of quality child care. Provide surrogacy as an option as well.

Provide reasonable care for the environment, without falling into the delusion that human beings are somehow not a part of nature and should feel alienated and guilty. IOW, care for nature where desirable, but as conscious part of it rather than supposedly apart from it.

There's much more, but this should be enough for now to make Dingfod even happier.