What is the purpose of government? Sometimes amongst all the politics this rather fundamental question is left out.
Given the historical context, and the evolution of power over the past few thousand years, I think there is one purpose of government.
Any government should exist to create a state of social justice
[Please note I purloined the term social justice for the lack of anything better.]
This statement clearly needs to be expanded. To be specific the job of a government, as I see it, is to create a cultural and physical space in which all members of a given governed population may be judged and measured by and solely by their choices. Those choices, by definition, have to be both informed and free. That is, poor education is a limitation upon a person's choice because of the absence of options, and there should be no coercion in the choosing. Equally poor health, or other forms of "poverty" (both material and cultural) are barriers to free and informed choices.
That is to say, that societies should be about the choices of individuals, all adding up to the collective "will of the masses." Those choices should be totally free and unimpaired.
Now, this is very hypothetical stuff, given that I can't think of a single government that behaves solely in this manner. However, I feel it's not a far cry from what we should be asking from our governments. It is also rather ill defined, but that is because ultimately such judgements are cultural and complex. The measures of judgement of an individuals choices are subjective. Personally I would hold them to some broadly humanist scale but that is ultimately my own personal bias.
However, I think this is what we really desire from our politicians. To, in essence, allow us to make our own lives whilst ensuring that we don't impede on the lives of others in the process. It's a pretty fine line and many of the ideas that are common in politics stem from this basic desire, albeit oftentimes cloaked in deceptive biases of one form or another.
Happiness, goodness, and the likes are both fluid and temporary. Freedom, however esoteric and difficult to measure, is as close to a permanent measure of the relative success of a government. However free their populations are to pursue lives that are genuinely based solely upon informed and free choices, the "better" I feel they have performed.
Asking the purpose of a government is a tricky thing, mostly because there are so few examples of functioning modernity that lack a government. There's no point for comparison, so we can only compare the spectrum of existing governments and compare them to one another, and hypothesise from what we find.
Moreover, I eliminated measures like wealth, happiness and power as unrepresentative. Wealth is largely unhelpful because of the example of "relative poverty" - the concept that even the rich have their poor, and they are, whilst not as disenfranchised as the truly impoverished, are alienated from a political and popular culture that increasingly does not represent them.
Happiness is hard to define at the very best of times, and can be equally the result of chance and of intent. Suggesting that governments should make everyone happy implies that only the emotional results of what a government does is important and not the actual "moral" content of their actions.
As for power, even when it is somehow measurable it is as fluid as any other concept that exists solely in the minds of human beings. People can feel powerful even though they may not otherwise appear to be, and people can feel utterly disempowered even when they have the tools to make more of their personal power. Further, influence and power do not accurately measure a society's relative values. China is immeasurably fiscally powerful at the moment but that does not necessarily translate into the success or failure of that government relative to others, nor how it is viewed by it's governed population.
Now, all this said, I am fundamentally biased, I was born and raised in a culture that values freedom and fairness. However, freedom particularly is a useful measure of the relative success of a government because it demonstrates that it can control it's population sufficiently well to prevent them from impeding on one anothers happiness whilst allowing them to pursue it for themselves, allows individuals to pursue power or wealth with vigour whilst protecting others from the greed or malevolence of anyone for whom those things matter more than morality.
As always, debate and disagreement about the content of this blog is encouraged. All constructive comments welcomed.
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