You get what you pay for

Americans complain a lot about taxes being too high, which implies that lower taxes are always better. We speak as if the money we pay in taxes is just wasting our hard-earned dollars, and ideally we should keep all we earn and spend it entirely on things of our own choosing. When pressed, I suppose most of us will admit that the government actually uses those tax revenues to do things like maintain armed forces, which most of us will admit are necessary. Leaving aside the question of waste for the moment, what things we are willing to give our government money to accomplish?

This is the first in a series of posts about the role of government. What is government for, and what should we expect of it? In American schools, we learn about the structure of our own government, and from the polls I’ve seen, most of us promptly forget it all. But it is not until specialized college level courses that more general questions about the purpose of government are brought up.

The first broad area of government activity can be called Security. Quite likely it is this function that first led to the creation of government. We can divide Security into a few aspects: External, Internal, and Border Control.

External Security generally takes the form of military organizations. Almost every nation in the history of our planet has had some kind of military force, and very few citizens of any nation would argue that it is not needed (Costa Rica is an interesting counter-example, having abolished its army in 1949, as is Liechtenstein, army-less since 1868). Of course, the size and organization of the military are subject to a wide variety of possibilities. Some countries spend as much as 10% of their GDP on their military forces, some less than 0.1% – the US comes in around 4%, though some military programs are difficult to quantify, so this could be slightly higher. (Information from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.)

Most countries with coastlines maintain some kind of coast guard, which may or may not be considered military. They provide a wide variety of services, such as search and rescue, that are outside the scope of defense, as well as border control and law enforcement. For example, the UK’s Coastguard is a civilian agency, while the Icelandic Coast Guard is a law enforcement agency. The American Coast Guard is a branch of the military which has some non-military functions.

Which leads us to law enforcement or Internal Security. This is another area that virtually all nations have, and organization and duties vary widely. In the US, most law enforcement is organized at levels other than federal, such as state, county, city, or whatever, though we do have the FBI and a few other national entities. For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll include courts and prisons in this category of government activities.

Border Control is another aspect of Security that governments engage in, and another function that few citizens would protest. Even countries with the most liberal immigration policies want some control over who enters, and most countries are interested in stopping the entry of certain items, like illegal drugs, dangerous materials, weapons, disease-carrying people, animals or plants, and so on.

That’s my broad overview of one of the least controversial functions of government. Check back next week when we move into areas that more people take issue with. While we may argue about the details of enforcement, budgeting, and so on, virtually all of us agree that our government should perform these duties.