What Good is Government? And What is Good Government?

Every election season we hear how terrible government is, how we need to limit government, and how much the right-wing politicians hate the government … that they desperately want you to elect them to work for.  Seriously, would you hire a mechanic who hates cars?  Why would you elect a representative who hates government?  But I digress.

Why do we have government?  Why did frontier communities, for example, create governments?  Did they get together and say, “Folks, we need someone that we can all hate.  We need an organization to make a bunch of rules, that we can blame for every problem, and have unrealistic expectations that they will solve big problems in one four-year period or lose the next election.  We will call it ‘GOVERNMENT’.”  No, they did not.

Luckily the brilliant authors of the United States Constitution included a Preamble where they listed the six reasons why they created the government:

We the People of the United States, in Order to

1. Form a more perfect Union,

2. Establish Justice,

3. Insure domestic Tranquility,

4. Provide for the common defence,

5. Promote the general Welfare, and

6. Secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,

Do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Those are the six functions of government.  Our government exists to promote unity between the states and to provide individuals with justice, tranquility, the common defense (public safety), the general welfare, and liberty.  The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution adds that every human being withing the border of the country has a right to these benefits of government.

What is good government? 

Good government manages the relations between the states to make sure we have a strong union, and protects every person’s liberty, justice, tranquility, public safety, and general welfare.

Bad government fails to perform those six functions.

Frontier communities created governments because they needed a common defense against those who would attack their community.  They needed justice whenever disputes arose between community members.  They wanted tranquility when things in town got out of hand.  They each wanted liberty as well of course, and all these protected rights contributed to unity in the town and the general welfare of everyone living there.

The Preamble Scale

All that is fine but what can we do with it?  How can we take this and use it to create more good government?  We can’t arrest lawmakers for failing to provide justice to a group of people.  What we could do is take the matter to their bosses.

The Preamble to the Constitution is the job description for every person who works for the government whether they are elected or not.  We all have some small part to play in protecting our citizens’ liberty, justice, tranquility, public safety, and/or general welfare.  Few of us are responsible for performing all of those functions, but we all perform at least one.

We could use the Preamble as a scale for weighing how good policies are based on whether they contribute to or undermine these six functions of government.  Instead of demonizing our opponents and calling them names, we could use these functions to debate whether a bill should pass, and club them over the head with it in social media when they fail to do their jobs. 

Does the bill unify the nation or divide it further? 

Does it increase justice or deny justice to some groups to increase power for other groups?

Will the bill promote tranquility, or drive people toward conflict and violence against one another?

Will the proposed policy make us safer as a nation?  Will it make certain populations less safe?

Will the general welfare be increased by the policy being debated or will the general welfare suffer under the new law if enacted?

Will the new law, if enacted, restrict people’s liberties, or enhance them?

For example, the mask mandate during the COVID pandemic was a good policy because it protected the general welfare by saving millions of Americans from disease and death, even if it was a slight intrusion on our liberties by requiring us to wear masks that we might not want to wear.

We can see from that example that using this scale we can weigh the slight impingement of individual liberty, the required wearing of a mask, against the benefit to the general welfare by preventing the death of millions more Americans. 

The Preamble Scale can also fill the void in policy analysis for legislation that feels good but does nothing for America.  The prime example of this is the 2017 tax cut bill that had no positive benefit for America, added $2 Trillion to the national debt, and increased government corruption as it was widely reported that political donors openly considered it as payback for their campaign donations in 2016. 

Corporations that received the tax cuts used much of the money to buy back their own stocks, artificially inflating their market value and the value of the market overall.  The 2017 tax cuts seriously harmed the general welfare of the country, but people were too busy celebrating the additional money in their pockets.

If we focus on an objective measure of good government, like a Preamble Scale or something like it, and we use it to measure the effectiveness of our leaders, criticizing the ineffective ones for not following the Constitution, perhaps we can create more good government in the future.