Laszlo Nagy

Mrs. Tobey

American Government

Governments are created to protect the people of their nations and let them live a

peaceful life. Their job is to take part in international politics to ensure peace and equality for the

people. The government should allow people to freely live their own lives, not make one for

them. Government's first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives, (Ronald Reagan).

Government today is mostly nothing but a negative necessity and a burden on the shoulders of

the people. Many people, such as Republicans and Libertarians, believe that government

regulation is bad. It inhibits freedom and liberty, warps the market forces of the economy, and

interferes in areas the government should have nothing to do with, (American Government). If

government is to be a positive force, it needs to be changed to interfere less with peoples

everyday lives and focus more on national problems.

A good government should only care about the overall state of the nation it serves, it

should not poke its nose into individuals business. Todays governments pass laws depicting

what people may and may not do, but many of these laws speak of situations where the decision

of whether they should or should not do something needs to be left up to the person or people

involved. We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the

government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission;

which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force, (Ayn

Rand). A government that promotes freedom should not make their own citizens lives a prison
filled with hundreds of rules and regulation. People are capable of thinking for themselves,

which means they do not need a higher power doing so for them. ... government is not a positive

force for good but an evil necessity to perform only those functions that individuals cannot do

alone. For example, government ought to provide for the national defense, border and

immigration control, and the collection of some minimum level of taxation to pay for the above

duties but not for things like the war on drugs and gun control,(American Government). A good

government should not make decisions for their people, but rather secure their freedom so that

they may make decisions for themselves.

One of the largest problems with todays governments is that they control large

businesses and the trade market. The government serves the people and is the symbol of their

society. The people do not work for the government, and the society they created is not owned

by the government either and yet every government acts as if it is always the latter. The national

market should be owned and controlled by the people. This way, what is needed by the people is

what will be given to the people. A nation that requires people to run its market will be better

managed and more fair to the public because it will by run by the people, for the people.

Advocates for less government believe that government should not interfere in the lives of

individuals and that, by and large, the market and individuals ought to take care of social and

economic problems, (American Government). If there is a problem and the people want it

solved, they will come up with a solution that tackles the problem in the most effective and

fairest way possible. The people should control their lives as a community, not be controlled by

the government.
 Modern governments no longer focus on pleasing the people that give them the power to

make laws and to protect them. They focus on staying in power by oppressing the people in

subtle ways with inconvenient laws. The government slowly makes people think they don not

have the power to make society more fair and beneficial for them. Let us never forget that

government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy

are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this

country, (Franklin D. Roosevelt). A large government can only hope to keep control of every

part of everyones lives is by making people believe that they are the pawns of the government

even though it is meant to be the other way around. When people are allowed to be truly free,

they are capable of realizing the truth about the world around them and will do everything within

their power to fix the problems that plague it. The happiness of society is the end of

government, (John Adams). A nations government should always be small because if it is ever

allowed to grow, it will assume total control over people and go from serving the citizens to

controlling them.

It is amazing to see how governments throughout the world went from controlling the

people to serving the people and now has gone back to controlling peoples everyday lives. The

government controls peoples lives, the market, and peoples powers to change the laws that

imprison them in their free lives. Government is a positive force as long as it does what it was

originally intended to do, and no more. Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary

evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one, (Thomas Paine).