A quick quiz. No wrong answers, just interesting results.
What is the proper role of government?
Pick the answer closest to your gut:
The Helper. Government ought to solve social problems and help people.
The Guardian. Government should make moral laws, preserve tradition, and keep order.
The Referee. Government should just protect your rights to life, liberty, and property.
None. Government is a corruptible monopoly.
Okay—got your answer? Hold onto it.
We’re going to take each answer seriously. Then we’ll see which ones survive.
Answer A: The Helper
Let’s start with what is arguably the most popular answer. Call it The Department of Problem Solving, or The Helper of Last Resort.
Whether it’s poverty, addiction, housing, or the pothole on Elm Street, when something goes wrong, many think government officials should be responsible for fixing it.
It’s a nice idea. But it has a sorry track record.
First, government officials tend to do things poorly. The people who staff the government aren’t stupid. But they almost never pay the price of failure.
A restaurant that serves bad food closes. An agency that delivers bad outcomes asks for a bigger budget. And it almost always gets one.
So problems don’t get solved. They get displaced, or they metastasize. The War on Poverty is approaching retirement age, yet poverty showed up at its last birthday party.
Moreover, the Helper government changes us.
When there’s a department for every problem, we stop seeing the problems as ours to solve. Responsibility gets outsourced to a faraway bureaucracy with a phone tree. Neighbors who might once have organized a meal train or a mutual aid society can barely muster a thumbs-up on social media.
The Helper helps people, all right. It helps them forget how to help each other while the bureaucrats help themselves to ever-expanding budgets.
And don’t forget: programs almost never die. If no customer can walk away, then no one is accountable. The program hoards resources. The mission creeps.
Have you ever known a government agency to solve a problem and then immediately shut itself down?
I’ll wait [drums fingers].
Answer B: The Guardian
Here, government’s job is to keep us civilized. Enforce decency. Protect our culture. Keep law and order. Many people think government is the body responsible for making us good.
The trouble is, you can’t legislate morality. The state can only legislate punishment or require recompense. If it tries to police a victimless vice, that vice goes underground.
Prohibition didn’t end drinking, after all. It gave us Al Capone. The Drug War didn’t end drug use. It gave us cartels and products laced with fentanyl.
And here’s another problem with Answer B: culture doesn’t need a warden.
Families, congregations, fraternal orders, and schools have carried traditions for millennia without a ministry supervising them. Once the state appoints itself keeper of a tradition, it has to decide whose tradition counts. And your peaceful neighbor, with his different gods and different holidays, becomes a problem to be managed.
Finally, order matters. Nobody wants chaos. But order comes in two major kinds.
Emergent order grows. Language. Markets. Common law. A crowded sidewalk where nobody collides.
Imposed order arrives wearing a badge. No doubt we need policing. We just need to be careful about what we police. Imposed order has a habit of turning intolerant. Then violent.
As Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter reminds us:
Law professors and lawyers instinctively shy away from considering the problem of law’s violence. Every law is violent. We try not to think about this, but we should. On the first day of law school, I tell my Contracts students never to argue for invoking the power of law except in a cause for which they are willing to kill.
Answer C: The Referee
This one’s popular with my audience.
It’s government as a humble night watchman. And if something happens, it’s the fair-minded arbiter who decides who injured whom. Government, on this view, should keep the game fair—not by ensuring equal outcomes, but by applying rules equally.
We can grant that premise. We do need people willing to protect life, liberty, and property.
The trouble is, the Referee—watchman and arbiter—will be tempted by power. Give one faction exclusive power to judge disputes, including those over the extent of its own power, and see what happens.
To avoid such problems, the American founders wrote the most careful referee’s manual in history. A few pages of enumerated powers.
Two and a half centuries later, the referee owns the league, sells the tickets, rewrites the rulebook, and bilks the players. The Referee who started out calling fouls now commits them routinely.
So even if you believe protection and adjudication are core functions every society needs, a harder question lingers:
Is a monopoly government the right body to perform them?
Answer D: None
Which brings us to the fourth answer, the one for outliers:
Government is a corruptible monopoly.
Weigh each word carefully.
A monopoly government is a single provider of governance services, over a vast territory, backed by the threat of force. Corruptible means it is run by people who are vulnerable to temptation and drawn to power.
Combine corruptible and monopoly, and you get the most dangerous arrangement a society can allow: power you can’t refuse, held by people you can’t trust.
We already know how monopolies behave. Higher prices. Worse service. Contempt for the customer. Why do we expect better when the monopoly carries guns, takes no accountability, and is willing to throw its customers in jail?
Well, most people just can’t imagine the alternative.
But there is one.
Competition. In governance itself.
Governance, after all, is a bundle of goods and services: security, dispute resolution, rule-making, safety nets. Each can be provided by entities that have to earn your participation—and keep earning it.
Unhappy? You have recourse.
Over it? You can exit.
Otherwise, people owe a strong moral justification for why you must accept the monopoly bundle.
But here’s the twist. Choosing “None” doesn’t mean rejecting the Helper, the Guardian, or the Referee. It means we all get to choose them according to our ideals.
Want a community with generous mutual aid?
Join one.
Want strict moral codes and deep tradition?
There’s a covenant for that.
Want a bare-bones night watchman and nothing else?
Sign here, please.
The first three answers become menu options. Nobody gets to impose their choice on you.
That’s what ending the monopoly buys us. Lower prices. Higher quality. And more ways to live and self-organize than any capital could ever conceive.
Coda
Go back to your original answer.
If you picked Helper, Guardian, or Referee, you weren’t wrong about what people need. But you might have been wrong about who ought to supply it—and whether you really get a say in the matter.
So maybe the question isn’t “What is the role of government?” Maybe it’s why we let a single institution be the monopoly provider of some of the most important things in life.
Turns out a few of us are done waiting for permission to build the alternative.
I’m Max Borders. Let’s criticize by creating.
