What does a government do better than business?

[gbear]

I was just kicking this around. What is a government better at that than any business or free market?

My list:

1) Military protection- if business had to do it, the ycouldn't afford to do it competitantly over a country like ours. They might protect themselves, but why spend money to protect competetitors? For that matter, is it worth it to protect customers?

2) Judicial responcibility - Justice is not really always an economic boon. What's more, the government has the advantage of broader scope. A business would only be interested in justice as it pertains to itself. Monopoly regulation? Why would a company care? You got robbed? Why should a company care?

3) impartially collecting data- In many cases the government doesn't have incentive to make up facts. I know, there are different interpretations of data from Republicans to Democrats, but could you imagine getting leading indicator data from a business. That business would have massive conflicts of interest. For that matter, would you trust a drug company to be the be all and end all of research on their new drug?

4) My big one- Anything of sufficiently broad scope that betters society while not necessarily eing profitable. I believe there is a limit to the scope of what can feasably be accomplished in the private sector. Would we have ever set foot on the moon without NASA? What company would do that? It might not have been profitable at the time, but we have all kinds of satelite technology among other types of technology from this venture. To my mind, it comes down to identifying projects that are not necessarily profitable but have value to society. If they are huge projects, I believe only the government can really accomplish them by putting huge resources to accomplishing the task.

Under my last one, there are tons of leftist programs. I don't think any company could or would want to take over making sure the elderly have some money. THere's no economic gain to it, but I tend to believe there is societal gain. That's why the government does it.

I'm sure there are more things a government can do better than a company, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.

[redman]

There's a certain myth inherent in your premise: that the government, however inefficient it may be, is guided by impartiality and empathy in its behavior. That simply isn't the case.

The government is a beauracracy, and there is one universal rule that applies to all beauracracies (whether private or governmental): they fundamentally function to justify their own existence. They are as motivated by self-interest and ulterior motives as any private organization is. Heck, even their quest for further funding as a government beauracracy resembles to an extent a private company's profit motive. Think of all the times that the leaders of governmental beauracries get on the television to trumpet their great victories in some endeavor.

Look for example at scholastic organizations. You'd think that getting our children to do something as simple as read, write, spell, and add and subtract correctly would be something that would leave little room for debate. Yet school curricula and teaching remain one of the most politicized debates in our country.

The bottom line for me is that the government should be used as little as possible, because every incremental increase in the size and power of government carries with it an increase in the potential for tyranny. The synonym for government for the individual citizen is "coercion".

If you want to summarize my political philosophy in one short sentence, it would be that I fear and oppose as much as reasonably possible the concentration of power in any form (whether in the public sector or private sector BTW). In some instances, such as with the military, you simply can't diffuse the power in a way that won't hurt the military's ability to function to protect our country. (I would add that the ability of our federal system to effectively govern the military with civilian leadership represents a great triumph for our country; there hasn't been a military coup since George WAshington put down Shay's Rebellion in the 1790's.)

Likewise, as we're finding, homeland security needs to be centralized to cohesively analyze and respond to anti-terrorism information gathered by different law enforcement agencies and relating to various different small cells operating around the nation and the world.

OTOH, it's less clear to me that centralizing at the federal leval all decision making on policies and all funding on social wellfare programs is as essential. Indeed, you can very easily over-centralize an organization, making it too top-heavy which in turn stifles innovation by and motivation in the people out working the field, which again seems to be the problem in our educational system.