The Meaning Of Government

I do think that we have to split it up into the historical purpose of government and the current purpose of government. To begin with the historical viewpoint on government I see its purpose in a far more practical way, Being the leviathan allowing positive sum cooperation between different people. The problem of ancient societies was to cooperate in a mutually beneficial relationship. If you interact with another person you have to have the trust in the other one to work with you and not just rob you taking the benefits and leaving you empty handed. To understand what the cooperation means there is often a kind of Prisoners Dilemma. I will fraise it somewhat different to directly show its applicability. You play with two people. You can either cooperate or defect. If you both cooperate each gets twenty dollars if only one cooperates the other defecting gets five dollars and you lose five. If both defect each looses three dollars. Each chooses without the other knowing. Now you can start by cooperating and risk the biggest loss but if you both cooperate you have by far the greatest advantage. Or you can defect and prevent the biggest fine if he also doesn't cooperate and have the chance to get something back. Now if you have no way of knowing the others action the very human answer is to defect so if he defects you don't suffer as much. And you insure the possibility of a reward. To cooperate is very dangerous seeing as it can be costly. Now in the context of a society you will have such situations all the time, With the added problem of repeating the process, Making every defection problematic in a later relation. It culminates with people driven by their subjective feelings and emotions to a zero sum game where the only way to achieve something is by steeling it from another or defecting on a cooperating other. Now it is obviously possible to see that after careful evaluation it would be reasonable for everyone to cooperate on the first terms but already the problem of having non rational actors makes such a prospect utopian. What allows us to achieve just this utopia is government. Government as defined by its earliest purpose having the monopoly on the use of violence with which it coerces the people in to cooperating in a positive sum game. Now this obviously benefits everyone which can be seen in even the crude calculation of the thought experiment. Now while this aspect was mainly important at the beginnings of society and government it is still the case today, In assuring that all accord to predictable laws. While it is well possible that we agree on the points I brought till here, I strictly disagree with you on the characterization of the current purpose of government. On the current purpose I think that it is to increase the flourishing of its citizens as far as possible. This means not to achieve equality of outcome, But a decrease in poverty which is the actual problem our society has. It is well argued by Harry Frankfurt in On Inequality where he identifies that the moral bad is not that people are different in outcome, But much more that some do not have enough (do not misunderstand me: I acknowledge that market economy has brought us huge benefits, But there is necessity for regulation). Unimportant of what is "enough" you always try to provide it on this view. There are several fallacies at work when you think that it is the job of the government to enforce equality of outcomes. Firstly it is the fallacy I have touched upon already which is the false analyses of looking at wealth as a fixed amount where the only way to get rich is by stealing from the others. This is not the case as people can create wealth in cooperation. Even while inequality increases the total amount rises so that everyone has more. Most of the benefits you see with having less economic inequality are mainly a correlation and not causation as Kelley and Evans showed in the paper Economic Development and Happiness. What can be seen is that the actual effect of inequality is rather correlation with other goods such as education, Income and wealth. They looked for differences while holding them constant and found that there is not actually an a causation of happiness. Now if you look at a developing country they found something even more surprising, As inequality there increases happiness maybe through hope. The social goods that you describe coming from equality are mostly due to increasing the other factors that clearly impact human flourishing, Such as GDP, Education or democracy in a country. It is thereby important to stress this difference between decreasing poverty and enforced decreasing inequality. Another important point here is that inequality is often conflated with unfairness, Which clearly has an impact on our happiness which we can already see in the studies on apes done among others by Brosnan. While unfairness is not preferred there is actual evidence that unequal but just societies are preferable ("Why people prefer unequal societies" Starmans, Sheskin and Bloom). This also shows that the goal of reducing poverty which goes hand in hand with a using the potential of the citizens it increases also their happiness if the rewards are correlated with your effort for them. Now as I come to your second point I want to make some things clear. The point that trying to achieve equality of opportunity, Which is absolutely necessary for a merit based system and thereby for reducing poverty and increasing the happiness as explained before, Fails at recognizing the "arbitrary factors" which make some worse off, Fails to see the principle behind the level playing field intended. It is the goal to adjust for exactly those differences. It is virtually the whole concept of equality of opportunity to eradicate the differences people have due to their starting conditions. Things like race, Sex and the monetary situation of you are exactly the things that those policies work against and this very well. Not to say that some fail at that, But most of the countries that are at the top of the world on all of those rankings, Do just that and try to adjust for differences in opportunity, By for example making health care universal, Education for free, Provide a social safety net, Invest into public services and so on. All of that is not equality of outcome but equality of opportunity. Also affirmative action in its core is not equality of outcome but equality of opportunity as well. It can be made the case that it is increasingly crossing the line, The later the adjustment for differences are placed. Anyway it is questionable whether it actually has direct positive impact as there are many different impact factors such as better education that has been increasingly been directed at women and minorities even before affirmative action and so that now in Europe for example women are in the majority of students in higher education (Eurostat code: educ_uoe_enrt01). I want to stress that as the study by Kochhar and Cilluffo at least as much as I could find is not saying anything about affirmative action and its impacts of it. It shows merely that there are differences that increased after the recession. Maybe I haven"t found the statistic you where referring to which is why it would be helpful to provide a clear path to find them. Therefore I want to conclude that the main purpose of government on the historical level is to be a coercive authority that allows people to cooperate effectively and in the current stand an entity that on the whole has to allow and pursue a decrease in poverty. And I do object to the characterization of equality of outcome as there is no real evidence for its effect and also no evidence that inequality is actually that much of a problem.