I awoke this morning to discover that Britain has a hung parliament. I spent the time until lunch with a spring in my step and a song on my lips until the girl at the coffee stand pointed out that this did not involve an extremely large gallows. Gloom ensued.Ah, well.
Update: Unfortunately, the means that Mr Gordon Brown stays on at Number 10. The reason given is, according to Professor Robert Hazell, from the Institute for Government,
We must always have a government, and until a new government can be formed the present government carries on.Very true. If Britain ever found itself without a government, there is every chance that people would start to notice the improvements.
4 comments:
So what is your government of choice, in general?
Gauss,
If you're asking about government "in general", I would say that my most general answer would be:
1) A small central government. The rule of thumb is that Defence should take up 51 percent of all expenditure. If it doesn't, you're not spending enough on it or too much on everything else.
2)Where the concern of the government is the interests of the nation's citizens and no one else. National policy should be summed up as "bloody selfish".
3)Where individual liberty and responsibility is the maximum possible balanced against public order, security of the realm, and perpetuation of the society the citizens choose to build for themselves. That does not mean a society based on a sort of contained anarchy, but rather one where the citizens themselves solve their own problems through their individual efforts, families, businesses, churches, charitable organisations, private schools and universities, etc. The government exists to support these institutions, not to supplant, control, or subvert them. For the needs of the people, government is the last resort; never the first.
4)The function of the central government is defence of the realm, conduct of foreign policy, standardising weights and measures, stability of the national currency, protection of private property, enforcement of contracts, maintaining the primary roads and ports, the protection of the commons, and reminding itself constantly to respect the traditions, faith, history, and customs of the people and that the people may swear allegiance to the monarch or the constitution, but never to any government.
Local and provincial governments have more responsibilities, but those generally tend toward park maintenance, game keeping, street lighting, collecting the rubbish and drunks, locking up criminals.
Once they stray out of those boundaries, any government should be looked upon with deep suspicion and regarded as wrong until proven otherwise. Any government that establishes or fails to abolish anything that has "community", "outreach", "equality", "diversity," or "green" in its title should be voted out of office.
So how would you handle the influence of large extra-national organizations? The oldest type I can think of would be religious institutions, then corporations, organized crime, social movement groups, etc. What happens when one of these behaves badly, but has strong social or economic ties to a region or the whole nation?
That's a rather large handbag, so my answer will have to be a bit vague. Corporations we can rule out immediately. They are actually very weak entities that need state power to have any real influence and always have been. Even the most powerful in history, the East India Company, had to bow to the nation state in the end. The same goes for any of your other examples. Any competent nation that has the will can by itself or through alliances combat any of these. Indeed, this has been the model of diplomacy up until the 20th century and all that farcical League of Nations nonsense.
The only one of your examples that poses any sort of threat is religion, but only if it fights from the pulpit. Then no manmade institution of any sort has any weapon to bring to bear. The fight is between faiths and the battleground is the hearts of men. If religion tries to fight in the temporal realm, then their leaders are mere earthly princes and will rise and fall as such. In which case, the first answer applies.
Now if you are talking about a situation where the people hold to one faith or ideology and the government another that it wishes to impose despite universal opposition yet refuses to relinquish power (I am assuming that this is not a matter of empire or military occupation), then we have a logical absurdity, as that government no longer has any legitimacy. It is a tyranny that exists solely to be overthrown.
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