From First-Principles To Modern Governments: How Big Do Governments Have To Be?

Where Do Governments Come From?

At the most fundamental level, human actions can be described by a set of key motivations, such as sexual companionship and freedom from pain. These guided us in our fight for survival in the harsh and unforgiving world of nature. Yet, in the lonely and harsh era before civilisation, it was a more than challenging quest to ensure these desires were met. In our modern world, with advanced technologies and a complex society, our quality of life is ridiculously better than the individuals fighting in the battles of nature and evolution. And how did we solve this problem? With society. We are social creatures and that has been our great advantage. How could we triumph against the tyranny of nature? Just as Hobbes said, we develop a social contract. But what did this look like?

Our societies and governments were not always as complex as they are today. In the beginning, they were merely small tribes. Groups of a few families that would protect each other and work together not as individuals, but as a unit. As Neitzche said, this was the beginning of the master morality. What was moral and good was what benefits the community, and ensures collective survival. Over time we developed beyond a simple tribal unit and began to organise ourselves in a way that would ensure optimal decision making. There was a respected tribal leader, often with an accompanying hierarchy of lower leaders, that would bring the community together and work to make the best decisions as to the development and organisation of society. They would create and enforce laws to guide their community, and would lead the people in war and diplomacy. We can clearly observe this level of societal organisation in ancient Egypt, around 4-5 thousand years ago, and from there it continued to develop further.

The emerging complexities in governments more and more began to resemble a society familiar to our world today. With systems such as the Roman Republic having organised judicial and democratic systems, stronger armies and infrastructure development, governments grew in their role. After a bit of a monarchical slump in the middle ages we eventually, with the American revolution and beyond, saw the rapid emergence of complex and democratic governments. These were arranged with a more specific role of serving the people and, particularly after the civil war, were given the duty of overseeing legislation, law enforcement, regulation, social welfare, infrastructure development, economic management, education, defence and international relations. This has brought us to the here and now, in almost every way the most complex period of societal and economic organisation we have ever seen.

The Current State of Governments

In the modern world, we have countries consisting of millions, sometimes billions, of people. All of these people are individually engaging in complex economies – running businesses or working jobs to make money, and spending that money on a vast array of distinct things. Furthermore, we make use of a wide variety of social institutions to organise and aid us in our lives, from schools to banks to churches. Overall, we expect to be able to spend our time engaged in social and economic activities without worrying about chaos, violence, unfair economic activities and other such undesirable circumstances. This is expected to be taken care of by the government and anything less than so is not acceptable. So, as the next stage, the primary focus of governments now has turned to ensuring ever greater order in our social and economic affairs.

This has manifested itself in more focus on economic and social regulation (and legislation), as well as further investments into greater infrastructure and technologies. This often results in greater economic and social prosperity, as well as significant technological advancements, which is often inspired by a sort of nationalist spirit. The greatest example of this is the Apollo program in the late ‘60s and ‘70s in the US where, although by no means the purpose of government, it was the government that brought about one of the greatest technological and exploratory feats in history, and set up an innovative future industry. Nevertheless, this is not the fundamental role of government, and this example is drastically more brilliant than is typical. In most countries, investment into development of infrastructure and technology is renowned as being inefficient, over budget and often unsuccessful. For instance, the Australian government recently invested $800 million taxpayer dollars into Silicon Quantum Computing, an Australian-based quantum computing company, to assert their position in the race for quantum computing. Yet this has justifiably raised concern due to its unclear return on investment, as well as many of its key operations occurring in the US, and not Australia. These levels of inefficiency are well known and exist just as well in the realm of regulation, so it seems that there is a need for change.

The Need for Change

Governments, especially nowadays, are set up very much like a business. Citizens pay them money (in the form of taxes) and in return the government provides a collection of services (such as protection from criminal activities and war, good infrastructure and public institutions, etcetera). So it tracks that for that “business” (or government) to be a good one, it would actually be providing value for money. This would mean that the government should be investing in things that are collectively desirable, and in a way that is transparent and efficient. If not, we may well be getting ripped off. For this reason, I am in great agreement with DOGE (department of government efficiency), a temporary department set up under the new Trump administration to be headed by Elon Musk. The purpose of this  department is to cut down government spending on unnecessary and inefficient investments, essentially ensuring greater value for money for taxpayers. It now seems apparent what we need to be changing, but how must we go about it?

It is clear that with complex economies and societies it can become necessary for governments to fulfill more than their fundamental purposes. Yet a line must be drawn and as governments get bigger and more bureaucratic, the risk dramatically increases for inefficiency and uselessness. To solve this problem there are two domains that we must investigate, namely regulation and investment into technology and infrastructure development. In terms of regulation, we must first make clear our definition. Legislation refers to the laws passed by a legislative body such as a congress or parliaments, while regulations are rules created by government agencies that give specific details on the implementation of those laws. Yet, unlike legislation (which is necessary as long as it isn’t corrupt), the specificity of regulation so often causes disorganisation, confusion, inefficiency and confusion, as well as becoming socially and economically intrusive. It is hardly uncommon for regulations to become ridiculously complicated and difficult to navigate, as well as even conflicting and redundant in many circumstances. These messy regulations are by no means desirable to citizens, so how do we solve this?

The solution to this problem is simply to cut down on the enforcement of regulation, and to ensure that regulations are not developed beyond what is actually necessary. This would involve developing one centralised government agency split into specific and unambiguous components, where regulations are well-researched, organised, transparent (in development and review), and periodically reviewed. The next problem lies in the development of infrastructure and technology, where the solution is again clear and simple. We must have one centralised government department to overlook infrastructure development, ensuring that investment is done as efficiently as possible, and not until there has been a rigorous and transparent investigation. Similarly, investment and incentives into technological development must be as unrestrictive to the market as possible, and only made when publicly useful and desirable. Overall, it is clear that we have allowed the government institution to grow too large, inefficient and bureaucratic, and it is paramount that we change the system.

How do you see it? Comment your take👇

If you enjoyed this article or are interested to learn more, check out the articles below on governance and institutions:

• Political Systems and Innovation: How Governance Models Shape Technological Progress

• Balancing Institutional Power: The Integration of Centralisation and Decentralisation