The Role of Government in a Free Society

Throughout our history, the most common condition for humanity has been to live in a state of poverty, misery and submission to a privileged class. The concept of “freedom” or “liberty” was essentially unknown until the Classical Period of Greece and, even then, it was a notion in relation to the ruling class, alone. In Plato’s Republic, as an example, only 10% of the people had the freedom of citizenship; all the rest were either Helots (εἵλωτες or heìlotes) or women and children and had no say in the direction of government action.

Our Founding Fathers had quite a different take on just what the role of government should be if our society was to remain free. 

As I posted before, “government” is best defined as a complex of political institutions, laws, and customs through which a sovereign authority expresses its will. In our case, that “sovereign authority” was intended to be the People. The U.S. Constitution was designed to set up parameters defining the type and branches of the federal government, the privileges granted to it and the limitations placed upon it, for the direct purpose of protecting our lives, our natural and personal rights and other liberties. This prime purpose was to be accomplished by three, distinct activities - waging war, waging peace and maintaining a level playing field for commerce.

Waging War

The waging of war has one goal; to protect the People from foreign aggression. This is an act of defense against an attack on our citizens and NOT intended to be aggressive in nature. Our founders recognized that we have an absolute, natural right to defend ourselves in the event of an attack, but we have no right to attack others without provocation. The understanding that a nation without borders to defend is no nation at all and can be readily seen in the expression,” good fences make good neighbors”. In any war, morality is never on the side of the aggressor.

Waging Peace

By “waging peace”, the intent is to protect the individual citizen from other citizens. This was to be accomplished by a civilian police force and a fair and impartial judicial system through courts of law. The courts are supposed to be the guarantor for the protection of the People’s life, rights, property and contractual obligations are intended to be found here. The police force, which is actually not permitted at the federal level under the original terms of the Constitution, was to be a peace force at the local level and under the control of the civil, elected authorities. We seem to have lost this when they started to call themselves “law enforcement” rather than “peace officers”.

Maintaining a Level Playing Field for Commerce

The Founding Fathers understood that unfettered commerce was the life’s blood of economic stability and prosperity. The three times in human history where free markets demonstrated this and elevated the common man out of grinding poverty were in the Republic of Rome, in Renaissance Italy and in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries in the U.S. and the U.K.. In all of these examples, the free movement of people, merchandise and money across borders led the greatest flowering of prosperity ever recorded in the west. They were also, for the most part, absent any governmental oversight and control. 

(The repeal of the “Corn Laws” in England in 1846 is a shining example. Practically overnight, the U.K. was turned from the most corrupt, criminal nation into the most prosperous, law abiding nation in Europe.)

The Legitimate Form of Taxation

The only legitimate form of taxation is to maintain these, three governmental activities and these three alone! The federal government should play no role in anything beyond these three objectives and this was so for a good deal of our history.  From the beginning, government at all level operated at between 3% and 5% of the gross national income all the way until the 1930’s.  In fact, the only contact the People had with the federal government until the so-called Civil War was with the “Post Roads” for mail delivery. Today, we can readily see how the government has inserted itself into our society and has taken over many of the roles that should be societal.

Taxation which takes from one group by force or coercion to redistribute to another is merely a form of legalized plunder and is immoral on its face.

Our government was never intended to preside over a “nation”; it was intended to serve the common interests of a “federation” of independent, sovereign nations composed of free, independent, sovereign citizens. This all changed with the outcome of Lincoln’s War; the federal government started its journey into centralization and “These united States of America” became “The United States of America”.