Government Revisited: The central role

Government Revisited: The central role
by Joseph Rowlands

What is the primary purpose of government? The typical Objectivist position is that the government’s job is to protect our rights. This inevitably leads to the question of whether the protection of rights needs to be done by the government, or if it can be done privately. Before even going down that path, I want to suggest an alternative.

A different role that government satisfies is in judging the use of force. The government determines, for any particular use of force, whether it is proper or not. In the context of a libertarian government, that would mean that the use of force is in retaliation and not an initiation.

This judging of the use of force can easily be seen to be the primary purpose of government. The actual protection of rights can often be done by individuals or companies that they hire. Even today’s less-than-libertarian governments allow private security companies, bodyguards, use of firearms in self-defense, and a myriad of other non-governmental methods of protecting rights. But in all of these cases, the government reserves the right to judge whether any particular use of force was proper.

Retaliatory force must be used or initiations of force will only be encouraged. It’s in the interest of every member of society to make sure force is only used appropriately. But the actual retaliatory force can be administered by anyone. In other words, we care that retaliatory force is used, but we don’t care who actually carries it out.

Why would the government need to span the entire populace of a nation, if retaliation could be done by significantly smaller groups? In other words, what is the function of government that needs to span the entire populace? And the answer is the decision making when it comes to the use of force.

Every member of society has a stake in making sure force is limited to retaliation. And so each person needs to be convinced that this is the case. If they’re not convinced, they will believe that an initiation of force has occurred, and it’s in their interest to retaliate (whether individually or in groups).

Effectively, the problem of government is in making this group decision on how the use of force is to be administered. This has two components. The first is in deciding the general rules or principles of when force can and should be used. The second is in deciding for any particular case whether it applies or not.

You’ll notice many governments are structured according to these distinctions. First, there is the executive branch, which is in charge of executing the decision. In a libertarian nation, this equates to the use of retaliatory force.

The second branch of government is the legislative branch, which determines the rules or principles behind the use of force. They have the difficult job of determining rules that can generally be agreed upon. And in a libertarian society, this would mean identifying what constitutes an initiation of force, and what the proper retaliation is.

The third branch is the judicial, and is in charge of applying the rules or principles on a case by case basis. They are responsible for determining what the appropriate use of force is in any particular situation.

Notice that the legislative and judicial branches don’t wield force themselves. Instead, they make the decisions on whether force should be used at all, what kind of force, and what are the limits of that force. And this is the role that makes government necessary in the first place.

The essential problem of government is making group decisions on the use of force. If you’ve ever tried to figure out what to do for dinner with a large group of friends, you can see how making decisions can be difficult. The bigger the group, the more chances for disagreement.

The difference between dinner and retaliatory force is that if you really can’t make up your mind for dinner, you can each do your own thing without affecting the other. But if one group decides to use force in a situation, and others decide that it is an initiation of force, war breaks out. Our lives depend on our rights being respected, and that means that initiations of force must be responded to with retaliatory force. If others try to get in the way, they are attacking our lives as well.

Making these group decisions, not just on the principles of how force will be used, but on the applications, is a serious problem. Failure can lead to bloodshed and civil war. The institution of government is created in order to solve this problem. And mechanisms are created in order to make the decisions agreeable to people.

For instance, a trial by jury does not give everyone a say in the particular decision on a person’s guilt. But it does give people the reassurance that a reasonable effort was put into coming to the right conclusion. In other words, although one job is to determine the guilt or innocence of a person, a bigger job is to convince society as a whole that the decision was based on the standard that was agreed upon.

How does anarchy fit into this picture? Anarchy is when different groups decide for themselves what uses of force are proper, and they are unable to agree with one another. The execution of force is still there, but the decision making is not. The decisions made are not generally agreed upon, and bloodshed is the result.

Notice that it is the decision making power of government that has always been fought for. The suffrage movements were for the right of individuals to be a part of the decision making process, not their right to join the armed forces or police. Civil wars are not fought over the ability to administer the laws, but in choosing them.

Discuss this Article (28 messages)