What do we really want?

OK, let me take another run at this. I suppose I should be more patient. Let's start at a beginning ...

For simplicity's sake, we're going to start in the political realm, for no other reason than that's where we've been as of late. Of course, a long-lost friend of mine raised the question, so he got me thinking about a possible answer. What is more, we're coming up on elections in the USA and Germany, and Lord knows how much drivel, if not downright misinformation, is going to be spread around this time. And since the Americans are the first ones to go through this, we can use them as an example of what I'm talking about. So where do we start?

To my mind the first question we must answer is a very simple one: what do you think the purpose of government is? What my friend brought to mind was this whole idea of "big" government or "small" government or too much or too little government, as the case may be. I think what everybody wants is a government that does "what it's supposed to" (regardless of what we think that is ... we can get to that in a moment) and does it "efficiently" (whatever that might mean as well). In manufacturing, for example, some process are simply complex and large; others are smaller and leaner, but the goal toward which manufacturing strives is efficiency (economies of scale and scope), not size. To paraphrase a whole other area of human interaction: size doesn't matter. Some things have to be big to work. Other things need to be small to work. There cannot be one single size that fits all.

What all things can be, however, regardless of their size is "efficient". So, it struck me that this is one of those areas of life where size just doesn't matter. It really isn't about how big your government is, rather it's about how effective and (for those financial nuts amongst us) efficient your government is. I truly think that what everyone really wants (in this regard, at any rate) is a government that actually works.

You see, I told you it's a very simple question, and the answer isn't all that complicated either. The "problem" here, if you will, is that this question immediately generates a follow-on question ... a question that is perhaps more challenging: what's a government actually supposed to be doing? It would seem to me that a working government (or a working machine or process or ...) is one that does what it is supposed to do. So what is a government for? That's the real question.