Knowledge check: If a government had only 2 functions,what would they be?

[cryptoanarchist]

1. Suck my C***

2. Kill themselves

[Anon136]

To establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

those are some beautiful words. if only magic spells could actually constrain the government.

[myrkul]

One example of what I was talking about is roads. No one person or enterprise can justify spending money maintaining urban roads. Highways, yes. You could build a toll road, but in the city many people use them and there has to be easy access on and off. No room for toll booths, etc. It's a public good. But no one person or business gets enough benefit from them to be willing to pay for their maintenance.

Oh come now, you can't think of any other way to pay for roads than tolls or taxation?

Not a single one?


Good thing the market is more than just one person, and there are some pretty innovative thinkers out there. (The paint on the pothole patch reads "Re-freshed by KFC")

[Biomech]

Why always the roads? I think the Statist paradigm has truly run it's course, as y'all come up with the same "argument" over and over.

Let's face it. Governments SUCK at building and maintaining roads. You would do better to find some justification for them in aggressive war, because killing and destroying is all they are good at.

I live in Western Pennsylvania, if being in PA can be called living. Given the highway budget they have, our roads should be aucking fwesome. Instead, they haven't bothered to fix 'em in two decades, except to throw a bit of asphault over the bodies...

[townf]

1. Be huge

2. Be idiotic

[townf]

1. Waste time

2. Take up space

[crumbcake]

Let's not get lost in the details.  The two goals are:

(1) Endure
(2) Expand

In other words, a punctual rephrasing of "be fruitful and multiply."
Everything else (keeping peace, waging war, making and enforcing laws, providing social services etc., etc.) is an inevitable, but strictly incidental set of consequences.  Like defecating for living things: inevitable, but hardly raison d'etre.

Those goals have applied to everything, from molds to humankind, and persisted since (at least as far back as) the beginning of life.  The rest is sentimental fluff.  For those who like nifty quotes, here's one: "Consign it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."*

*I remembered it as "For it is nothing but sophistry and illusion: Consign it to the flames", but Google set me straight

[myrkul]

Let's not get lost in the details.  The two goals are:

(1) Endure
(2) Expand

In other words, a punctual rephrasing of "be fruitful and multiply."
Everything else (keeping peace, waging war, making and enforcing laws, providing social services etc., etc.) is an inevitable, but strictly incidental set of consequences.  Like defecating for living things: inevitable, but hardly raison d'etre.

More like means to those ends.
Charles Tilly distinguishes four activities performed by the State, as those "biological functions":

war making (“eliminating or neutralizing their own rivals outside the territories in which they have clear and continuous priority as wielders of force”), state making (“eliminating or neutralizing their rivals inside those territories”), protection (“eliminating or neutralizing the enemies of their clients”), and extraction (“acquiring the means of carrying out the first three activities—war making, state making, and protection”).

In a just world, only the third and fourth activities would be acceptable, and the fourth only voluntarily.

[cryptoanarchist]

Or how about:

1. F*** off

2. Die