It seems just to me to coerce people into
a) Not violating a minimal set of others' rights
b) Providing sufficient support for a military to protect the land from foreign invasion
c) Protecting the environment
These are the primary functions of government.
Secondary functions
d) Forcibly taking money from the fairly well-off the assist the indigent
e) Forcibly taking money from the citizens to provide funding for industries the people in power deem both sufficiently important and in need of subsidizing.
The primary functions are plainly necessary functions if the land is to remain civilized. Coercion is required for "a" because the protection of rights is the only thing that limits the use of coercive force. If you don't force people to respect others' rights (for the most part), then they someone will force people to do anything he wishes, and effectively replace one government with a despotism. The need to use coercion on your own citizens to protect them from foreign invasion is less obvious. It is safe assume that these people would have a strong interest in protecting their land, and that the very wealthy, at least, would happily fund their own protections, or make contracts with each other to keep invaders at bay. It is even likely that these investors would protect the poor from invasion as well, because the enemy on your neighbor's property is only barely preferable to the enemy on your own. However, if these investors form an army on their own, it is under their own control and thus, may easily take control of the actual government in a revolution. Once a government has been established, it has to have some means of protecting itself as an entity. Taking control of the armed forces is the obvious way to do this.
"c" is pretty easy to understand. Destroying the environment decreases the resources and increases the needs of nearly everyone. It is a subtle kind of rights violation. It might be handled by contractual agreements, but then those not a party to the contract (perhaps because they never pollute) would be subject to taking even more of the pollution than they would have without a contract.
It's easy to think of "d" and "e" as primary functions, but I think this is wrong. The first reason is that neither of these is necessary to maintain order in the land, and the second reason is that both can be done without coercion. Even today, volunteer organizations work to help the poor and indigent. Time and money are collected without ever threatening anyone or seizing assets. Most commerce and industry is funded without subsidies. The governing body, therefore, should not sacrifice any of its primary functions in favor of its secondary functions. However, the people do have a moral responsibility to do help the impoverished, and, if the first three functions of government are fulfilled, and the volunteer organizations still fall short of their responsibilities, the government needs to step in to assist (in addition to protecting) their weakest citizens. (And force their stronger citizens to do their moral duty)
"e" is complicated, because one could make an argument that supporting certain industries is necessary for national security. Keep food production high enough within the country so that we can feed ourselves if the next war closes our trade routes. Keep our manufacturing industry strong so that we can keep building military vehicles and such while we're fighting the war. We need a national transportation system so that we can deploy troops quickly. We need enough educated people to make complex calculations, so we should have public schools. I heard once that every major bill passed after WWII in the U.S. had the word security attached to it to help it get passed. I think there's a little more to this point than that. Some things may require government action unrelated to matters of national security. For instance, the telephone company in the U.S. was once a regulated monopoly, so that there could be a uniformity in telephone service. (It's still regulated, by the FCC, but it is no longer a monopoly). This was deemed necessary to getting the whole country wired, but this probably had to do with economics more than national security. The problem with forcing the citizens to fund this kind of thing is that there's no objective way to determine whether some industry is "sufficiently important." I'm glad we have an interstate highway system here in the U.S. but some people may wish it had never been built. Others may have wanted it built but been unwilling to pay anything for it. They were in the minority, I'm sure, but their status as minorities does not invalidate their arguments against the interstate highway system. One rule that would work if it were followed would be that the government should subsidize as rarely as possible, but I don't know how this rule could be put into force.
The infrastructure should encourage the creation of wealth, happiness and fairness for humanity.
I disagree. If the role of government is to promote my happiness, it's role is also to determine what my happiness is, and this it is wholly incapable of doing. Aside from that, there is essentially no law that a government could pass without being able to appeal to its necessity in their charge of encouraging the creation of wealth, happiness, and fairness. I also disagree that government is meant to serve humanity. It is meant to serve its citizens, for as poor as its decisions concerning what's best for its own citizens may be, it is infinitely worse at deciding the good of those most distant and unrelated to it. |
