3rd Edition Preview: The Role of Government
A draft of chapter three in the 3rd updated edition of "Think Right or Wrong, Not Left or Right: A 21st Century Citizen Guide."
I’m starting to draft the 3rd updated edition of my book to be published in the summer of 2024. My humble ambition is for it to have a pivotal, think-right-or-wrong, not-left-or-right impact on the upcoming presidential election. What follows is a draft of the updated chapter three. In the 3rd edition, I have decided to put more emphasis in this chapter on the fact that government has the monopoly on the use of force and that, properly implemented, government is a necessary good. And I’m trying to do it without taking up too much additional real estate, as, according to feedback I’ve received, brevity is one of the virtues of the book. To put the chapter in context, feel free to bookend by reading chapter 1, 2 (skipping chapter 3) and chapter 4 as well. Even better, buy the book. And I’d love your questions and suggestions either in the comments, or at anders@thinkrightorwrong.com. You have an opportunity to make an impact on the next edition (and the presidential election). Cheers!
3. THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT
If the single most important factor for being in control of your life is that your individual rights are respected and protected, then you would want someone to deter others from initiating physical force against you. And accept that that someone will deter you from initiating physical force against others as well. It goes both ways. Physical force in this context does not mean bodily harm only; it comes in many forms of individual rights violations from libel, embezzlement, forgery, fraud, and breach of contract to theft, battery/assault, and homicide.
If physical force is to be barred from social relationships, we need an institution charged with the task of protecting our rights under certain rules of social conduct. Government is that institution, and the rules of social conduct are what we call “the law.” Properly defined, “A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control—i.e., under objectively defined laws.”1 It is a precise but admittedly rather dense definition, so let’s break it down.
“Retaliatory use of physical force” means simply the force applied for breaking a law that is in place to protect our individual rights. If you break the law, you’ve got to pay one way or another. Retaliatory use of physical force may come on a scale from financial compensation to life in prison depending on how serious the rights violation is.
“Objective” (as in “under objective control”) means that the rules of social conduct—the law—should only address violations of individual rights. And specify the proper level of retaliatory force for breaking it. Nothing more, nothing less.
How do we go about achieving this? We, the governed, that is, you and me and everybody else, consent to give the government the monopoly on the use of physical force. Why? To prevent individuals and groups from exercising their own, possibly competing, views of what should be the rules of social conduct and their enforcement. Without our consent—without giving the government the monopoly on the use of physical force—society would descend into anarchy. But properly implemented as outlined above, government is a necessary good that we don’t want to be without. Properly implemented, government is morally Right.
But individualism and collectivism have vastly different views of the role of government. Individualism recognizes your right to be in control of your life and therefore acknowledges only an extremely limited role of government. According to individualism, government exists for one reason only: to protect your individual rights from being violated by others. In other words, individualism demands that government be implemented according to the definition discussed above: “A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control—i.e., under objectively defined laws.”
A truly limited government has three functions. It uses its monopoly on physical force to protect you from (1) foreign aggressors (the role of the military) and from (2) domestic aggression such as fraud, theft, murder, etc. (the role of law enforcement), and to (3) prosecute domestic aggressors and settle disputes (the role of the judiciary, the court system).
Collectivism, on the other hand, sees government force as a tool to further the goals of the group or groups of choice through taxation, redistribution, and regulation. Because collectivism considers your individual rights subordinated to the alleged rights of the collective or group, government in a collectivist society is less or more unlimited. By that we mean it can use less or more physical force, depending on how consistently a particular collectivist vision is implemented.
Under collectivism, the law expands to treat actions and behavior that don’t violate individual rights as criminal. From relatively minor infringement such as zoning laws, food regulations and excise taxes, to major violations like anti-trust laws and government takeover of entire sectors of society such as healthcare and education (much more about this in later chapters). As government strays from its core role of protecting individual rights, the law becomes non-objective. And government expands from not only being the protector but also a violator of individual rights, using its monopoly on retaliatory force to enforce the non-objective laws: punishment for accusations of breaking arbitrary anti-trust laws, for not complying with food regulations, for avoiding excise taxes, for daring to compete with government-controlled healthcare and education (again, later chapters will discuss these and other examples in much more detail). Under collectivism, government is going beyond being a necessary good. It becomes morally Wrong, an instrument for those who want your individual rights to take a backseat to the alleged group rights.
Adding the role of government to our table gives us the following picture:
You are correct if you think the description in this chapter of an ideal limited government is far from the government we have today. We are positioned on the unlimited government spectrum, but where? We’ll answer the question in the next chapter after we have looked at how collectivism manifests itself in society.
Ayn Rand: The Nature of Government (this link also includes her essay “Man’s Rights. Scroll down to get to The Nature of Government—or read both.)
Just a suggestion: In addition to Ayn Rand, other writers offer good "color" on the subject of rights and the limits on the government's use of force. Some poignant quotes inserted into your text would add some interest, in my view. Yours is a good effort, and I like that you want to keep updating and improving.
I so appreciate the either-or aspect of all your writing. I can't think anyone who reads this thinks it is something that will be accepted overnight, but if you don't know the ideal you are trying to achieve how will you ever hope to get there. As to the argument that morality is determined by each society for itself, I couldn't disagree more. Morality is the same for all human beings regardless of the society they are living in. The methods for insuring that people can live according to that proper morality may be different from society to society, but whatever those methods are they must protect the ability of each individual in that society to freely achieve his or her objectives in life through their own efforts while preventing individuals from initiating force against any other individual.