I work in a regulated industry. As in, everything we do, insofar as it pertains to final product, has some line of the Code of Federal Regulations (the CFR) that we are obliged to obey. Not only that, but we have to be able to prove, at a moment’s notice, that we did, indeed, obey the law. Imagine you had to write a paper when you drove your car, documenting that you had your seatbelt on, that you stopped at all the stop signs (with data to prove that you actually stopped), and included detailed speed readings for your entire trip. Every time. That’s something like what we have to do.

As you can imagine, the costs associated with all this are mammoth. Besides the legions of government bureaucrats that must rise up in an army of dark suits to review all these papers, the companies themselves have to support mini armies of their own bureaucrats to wage a paper war with the government. Heck, if these companies weren’t regulated, they could be a quarter the size they are now. For all the time and resources spent proving that everything was done properly, a whole slew of new innovations could have been developed, wonders of technology that we could all benefit from; why, global warming could be reversed in a heartbeat!

Well, that’s the fantasy that Newt Gingrich and other anti-government fear-mongrels would have us all believe. According to them, the very fact that we have any industry regulation at all is solid proof that we are one very short step away from that greatest of United Statesian bogeyman, socialism. And judging by the reaction of most people to the phrase, “regulated industry,” they’ve succeeded wildly.

It seems we need a collective refresher course on what the heck government is all about in the first place.

Not surprisingly, dictionaries aren’t terribly helpful. After all, once you get beyond “the exercise of political control”, or “having authority”, you don’t know much about the role of government in society, or what, in a grander sense, goverment means. For that, you need a good primer on government theory. On the recommendation of a friend who is in the government theory program at Harvard, I’ve been reading Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction by David Miller. Early on, he puts the question this way:

When talking about government here, I mean something much broader than ‘the government of the day’ – the group of people in authority in any society at a particular moment. Indeed I mean something broader than the state – the political institutions through which authority is exercised… I mean the whole body of rules, practices and institutions under whose guidance we live together in societies.

Since we are, after all, social creatures, this makes sense as a starting point. Societies are fantastically complex phenomena, and without some form of government, they cannot be expected to hold together. We must even consider social custom and taboo to be a part of this conception of government, to swiftly rebut the anticipated anarchist argument. And why not? Our behavior as individuals in a society is governed, or limited (think of governors on motors to get an idea of what the term means) by these accepted norms. Custom and taboo exhibit much of the same effect as codified laws; indeed, they govern individual behavior with greater force than political structures, since they derive from a deeper part of our psyche.

In this sense, government doesn’t need to be defined to require political authority, since the social code can serve much the same purpose. But our lizard brains are notoriously fickle, and depend on a whole host of special conditions to function. We need to know one another, to recognize that we are all part of the same society. Although evolutionary biologists can place much of our social behavior somewhere along the spectrum of other creatures, we still have to learn, at a higher level, what the local taboos and customs are. Instinct will only take us so far, and without a considerable bit of deliberate enculturation by the populace, the Hobbesian image of unbridled, self-serving chaos doesn’t seem so implausible.

It seems self-evident that avoiding that scenario is in everyone’s best interest. Perhaps, however, it isn’t so obvious. In Part 2, I will wander down the paths of what it means to say “functional society” before coming back to the original question of what government is, and why we United Statesians seem so confused on the topic.

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