The Evolution of Government

Understanding the Values and Tradeoffs of Government

• The norms or values people use to judge political events include order, freedom, and equality, and the government makes choices between these values.
• The concept of government has evolved over the years and is defined as a legitimate use of force to control human behavior with national sovereignty as authority.
• Citizens must surrender some freedoms to the government in exchange for protection and services, such as predictability and security, which can only be provided if citizens give up their freedoms.
• The oldest purpose of government is to maintain order, which can be established law to preserve life and protect property, individual safety, life, liberty, and property, or public ownership of land.
• The second major purpose of government is to provide public goods, which are benefits or services available to everyone but unlikely to be provided by individuals in the private sector, such as clean air, national defense, bridges, or parks.
• The more recently trending purpose of government is promoting equality, which can include income equality, social equality, civil rights, and national health care.
• Most government decisions are based on a tradeoff in values, and often when decisions are being made, there must be a tradeoff between freedom, order, and equality.
• Freedom can be viewed as freedom of or freedom from, with the former being liberty and the latter being a lack of constraint or equality.
• Order can be viewed narrowly as preservation of life and protection of property or broadly as preserving social order, which is the accepted way of doing things (norms).
• Basic equality is also known as political equality, dealing with the one person, one vote concept, but can expand to include social equality, such as equality in wealth, education, and status, and diverges into equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome.
• Rights are the benefits of government entitled to all citizens and are different from freedoms.
• The two main dilemmas of government are freedom versus order and freedom versus equality, with the latter being the modern dilemma, and examples of times when values clash are wealth redistribution, equal pay for men and women, and school busing during the civil rights movement.