What do you think of this government concept?

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The idea of government is to find the most effective way to stop the ignorant masses from killing themselves via internal conflict. What do you think of a government system based on that principle?

Well...that's basically why the whole idea of "government" was invented back in ancient times: to keep folks from constant small scale warfare by uniting them into larger population size (and geographic sized) units that can live and function together in peace.

Instead of each village fearing and fighting each other you get a whole country ruled by a king. And his subjects can trade between villages in peace.

One of the downsides being that when you do get war its then on bigger scale as well ( you trade constant small scale warfare for less frequent but bigger wars between larger communities). You can trust the villagers down the road to not collect your severed head (like tribes in New Guinea would), but you do have to pay taxes so that the king can wage wars against the neighboring king farther away.

So I am not clear as what you are suggesting. Basically you're asking "should government be government"?

What else could it be?

Pretty open to interpretation, a totalitarian dictatorship could be argued as best maintaining 'order' in society if that is the purpose of government. I would say that order does not have much value without liberty, order only being the preservation of the status quo. Government's purpose and legitimacy comes from being the protector of our natural rights, government does not grant us these rights but are rather they are innately ordained to us by our creator meaning they can never be taken away by tyranny and a government that does not protect these rights or becomes destructive to these ends has no legitimacy.

^^^

That's news to me, because for most of my life, I was told I have no rights!

Does that mean that this government won't stop the knowledgeable elite from killing others via external conflict?

Reminded me of this:

Patch had always felt, he wrote in The Last Fighting Tommy, that "politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder".

Could be worth trying.

My high school history teacher said something like that. That back in the feudal middle ages it was the aristocrats who donned knight's armor and led the way into battle. So the ones who took the main risks were the priviledged ones with the property. And that "maybe we should return to that system".

Except not really. Back when, the aristocracy had the best armor, the best weapons, the best training and horses, as well as a code of honour under which they expected to at worst get captured, be held hostage whilst still being treated as aristocracy, and then be ransomed back home to do it all over again. Meanwhile, all the plebeian peasant soldiers just died all over. Part of the whole English-French hatred thing is that the English developed the longbow and realized that they could just outright kill everyone, honour-code be damned. The French disapproved.


as for OT, I think the genereal idea is lacking the clause of "whilst still being a functioning society" or similar. Merely subjugating everyone and demanding non-violence isn't a society. Smells too totalitarian for my tastes.

It was the foot soldiers---the infantry--those who actually stormed the castles BEFORE the knights came to storm the castles, who bore most of the risks.

Silliest thing I ever heard.

The US govt "subjugates" you, and doesn't allow you to rob or murder your neighbor. That doesn't make the U.S. government "totalitarian".

It doesn't just "demand" that you don't do it- it backs up the demand with force.

So does the Canadian government with its people. Ditto King Solomon, and ditto the Pharoahs. That's the central point of having any kind of government: to keep order. Doesn't matter what the system of government is. You cant have markets, or anything else necessary for a "functioning society" in the first place with out an institution that can legally use force to keep order.

A "nation" just means "the largest group of people who don't fight each other".

All that the OP did is to describe every government and every nation on earth for the last five thousand years: a tribe of people who are forbidden to have internal fights by their government, but who can be recruited by their government to fight and kill outsiders for the whole tribe's defense.

Government is a military that is an occupying force over geographic location. It is also a military that is controlled by an administration.

Government, is an institution that facilitates class stratification, domination and subordination.

"Peace" under government, is a illusion.

Feel free to relocate from occupied, class-stratified, dominated and subordinated Minnesota, United States to Aleppo, Syria, then...

The only natural right is the right to live or die as determined by the law of the jungle. No government need protect it.

You're fortunate, in that case.




True, which is why I used the word "merely"; keeping the peace is part of a functioning society, but it's hardly the only thing. Maybe I read too much into the OPs rather derogatory phrasing, though.

And I'd like to point out that robbing and murdering your neighbour was rather frowned upon even when society consisted of small familial groups, with no real government to speak of.




That's true. I didn't say the government should not have police and military. But the OP sounds like she wants the military/police to BE the government.




If that's all it means, then NATO is a nation.




She described one aspect of the vast majority of societies, yes. But I'd rather not be without the other ones. And also, are you saying that nations without a draft lose their status as nations?

A very bad idea. Government was invented to manage real needs and they are complex not simple, so trying to reduce the "idea of government" to something very, very simple is an intrinsically bad idea.

A better idea would be to look at the areas that people think need some kind of governance and work out some organizing principles around those things.

You can see a very simple expression of these ideas in the US Declaration of Independence, which asserts that it is axiomatic that people are equal and have certain rights and that government exists to secure those rights.

The Constitution can be seen as a necessary amplification of that idea and the ideas in the Constitution are an adequate basis for a theory of government. The Preamble defines the purpose of the government it is creating:
"to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity"

The Articles and Amendments then detail approaches to achieving these purposes.

Your idea in the OP might be seen as a sort of elitist version that focuses only on the "domestic tranquility" part, but if you look at the other goals articulated in the preamble and imagine government not trying to do them, a pretty bleak picture emerges (unless you are a Libertarian ideologue).

What kind of government would you get if you wanted to secure domestic tranquility without justice, without a common defense, without promoting the general welfare or securing liberty and property rights?

It might look like this