Out of the clear blue, apropos of nothing at all, my spouse asked me, "What is the purpose of government?" Turns out that he wanted to pick my brain for this book he is supposedly writing.

However, his question got me to thinking--What IS the purpose of government? The ultimate purpose of government, as I see it, is to allow groups of people to live together in peace, following their own purposes and achieving their own goals.

I have a minimalist view in this. Government should exercise its power only for limited operational purposes--to secure justice, to ajudicate conflicting claims, to undertake for public works which benefit the community at large, to provide for security inside and outside the polity. In other words, to provide the opportunity for the individual's enjoyment of life, the exercise of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Anything more is interference at best, tyranny at the worst.

Think about it: one man, living alone, doesn't need a government. One or two or three families in a group will naturally have a leader, but not a government per se. By the time you have six to 10 families living in a small village, you need a government--a headman (or woman) to negotiate conflicts and to allocate joint resources.

It gets far more complicated as you go from tribe all the way through kingdom to nationalism, but the basic concept is the same. Government exists to serve the people. Through all the distortions of greed and religion, that principle still holds.