The Four Legitimate Functions of Government

I’m not an anarchist. I believe in a government, but a limited government. And the government should be limited, in my opinion, to very simple functions.

Number one: to defending the country against foreign enemies. I have tried for a long time to see how to make national defense a private enterprise and I’ve never succeeded. It’s easy to see how to privatize schooling, but I don’t know how to privatize national defense. So I’m reconciled to the fact that we’re going to have to pay twice as much as we should have to pay in order to get an effective national defense. Because anything government does on the average – there’s some things that are more, some that are less – on the average, anything government does cost twice as much as if it were being done by private enterprise. So, one function of government is to protect the country against foreign enemies, national defense.

A second function of government, and one which it performs very very badly, is to protect the individual citizen against abuse and coercion by other citizens. To keep you from being hit over the head, mugged on the streets, your house being broken into, and so on. And I believe that the government performs that function very ineffectively, because it’s try do so many things that it has no business doing.

A third function of government, a very important function, is to define the rules of the game we play. What’s private property? If an airplane flies 10,000 feet over your house is he violating your private property? If he flies 10 feet over your house is he violating your private property? There’s nothing natural about where the line should be drawn. So we have to have some mechanism for making the rules about that. And that is an appropriate government function.

And fourth, it’s appropriate for government to provide a mechanism for adjudicating disputes about the meaning of those rules – a judicial system.

Those are the four essential functions of government, in my opinion. And those are the only functions that are essential. There may be some other areas in which if you started with nothing more than that, government might conceivably do more good than harm; but from where you are now, if you could only move back in that direction it’d be marvelous. There’s no way you’re going to do it.

The best you can hope for is that you can hold down government, keep it where it is, and let the private economy expand so that government becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of it. And even that is a very optimistic expectation, though it’s possible.