The reduction in the size of the state is a process and not an event. Rolling back the state can be done over time giving people responsibility and power over their lives on a growing range of issues. The presumption that the state should only act when individuals can’t, however, would reverse the direction of legislation which has tended to see the intervention of the state into the lives of its citizens as beneficial in and of itself – not just the nanny state but the further assumption that ‘nanny knows best’.  The role of government should only to be that all have equal access to the available freedoms and that those freedoms are not abused. These principles are known as the law of equal liberty  and the non-aggression principle between the two of them they comfortably control and define the role of the state.