Government

A government is the body within an organization that has authority to make and the power to enforce laws, regulations, or rules.

Typically, government refers to a civil government—local, provincial, or national. However, commercial, academic, religious, or other formal organizations are also governed by internal bodies. Such bodies may be called boards of directors, managers, or governors or they may be known as the administration (as in schools) or councils of elders (as in churches).

Growth of an organization increases the complexity of its government, therefore small towns or small-to-medium privately-operated enterprises will have few officials compared to larger organizations such as multinational corporations which will have multiple interlocking, hierarchical layers of administration and governance. As complexity increases and the nature of governance becomes more complicated,so does the need for formal policies and procedures. Some people, known as anarchists believe that societies would function better without a government as they disagree with both the efficiency and the morality of using violence as a means (They deny the supposed legitimacy that has been granted through social contract theories).

Public sector governance is studied as Public Administration while that in the private sector is studied as Business Administration.

Types of government

• Constitutional monarchy - A government that has a monarch, but his/her power is strictly limited by the government. Example: United Kingdom
• Constitutional republic -- Rule by a government composed of representatives who are voted into power by the people.
• Democracy - Rule by a government where all [citizens] are represented but power is held by the majority.
• Dictatorship - Rule by an individual who has full power over the country. See also Autocracy and Stratocracy.
• Monarchy - Rule by an individual who has inherited the role and expects to bequeath it to their heir.
• Oligarchy - Rule by a small group of people who share similar interests or family relations.
• Plutocracy - A government composed of the wealthy class. Any of the forms of government listed here can be plutocracy. For instance, if all of the voted representatives in a republic are wealthy, then it is a republic and a plutocracy.
• Theocracy - Rule by a religious elite.

Other Classifications:

• Anarchism - Absence of government. Anarchism is not a form of government—it is the belief that governments are harmful and unnecessary.
• Totalitarianism - Characterized by a state that regulates nearly every aspect of public and private life.
• Authoritarianism - Characterized by an emphasis on the authority of the state in a republic or union. It is a political system controlled by nonelected rulers who usually permit some degree of individual freedom.

The extent to which a government can be classified varies by degree. For example, Iran can be seen as democratic, authoritarian and theocratic while constitutional monarchies such as the Netherlands combine elements of monarchy and democracy.

Origin of government

For many thousands of years when people were hunter-gatherers and small scale farmers, humans lived in small, non-hierarchical and self-sufficient communities. However, the human ability to precisely communicate abstract, learned information allowed humans to become ever more effective at agriculture, and that allowed for ever increasing population densities. David Christian explains how this resulted in states with laws and governments:

As farming populations gathered in larger and denser communities, interactions between different groups increased and the social pressure rose until, in a striking parallel with star formation, new structures suddenly appeared, together with a new level of complexity. Like stars, cities and states reorganize and energize the smaller objects within their gravitational field.

—David Christian, p. 245, Maps of Time

The exact moment and place that the phenomenon of human government developed is lost in time; however, history does record the formations of very early governments. About 5,000 years ago, the first small city-states appeared. By the third to second millenniums BC, some of these had developed into larger governed areas: Sumer, Ancient Egypt, the Indus Valley Civilization, and the Yellow River Civilization.

States formed as the results of a positive feedback loop where population growth results in increased information exchange which results in innovation which results in increased resources which results in further population growth. The role of cities in the feedback loop is important. Cities became the primary conduits for the dramatic increases in information exchange that allowed for large and densely packed populations to form, and because cities concentrated knowledge, they also ended up concentrating power. "Increasing population density in farming regions provided the demographic and physical raw materials used to construct the first cities and states, and increasing congestion provided much of the motivation for creating states."

Fundamental purpose of government

According to supporters of government, fundamental purpose of government is the maintenance of basic security and public order. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes figured that people, as rational animals, saw submission to a government dominated by a sovereign as preferable to anarchy.

People in a community create and submit to government for the purpose of establishing for themselves, safety and public order.

Early governments

These are examples of some of the earliest known governments:

• Sumer—5200 BC
• Ancient Egypt—3000 BC
• Indus Valley Civilization—3000 BC
• Yellow River Civilization (China)—2000 BC

Expanded roles for government

Military defense

The fundamental purpose of government is to protect one from his or her neighbors; however, a sovereign of one country is not necessarily sovereign over the people of another country. The need for people to defend themselves against potentially thousands of non-neighbors necessitates a national defense mechanism—a military.

Militaries are created to deal with the highly complex task of confronting large numbers of enemies. A farmer can defend himself from a single enemy person—or even five enemies, but he can't defend himself from twenty thousand—even with the help of his strongest and bravest family members. A far larger group would be needed, and despite the fact that most of the members of the group would not be related by family ties, they would have to learn to fight for one another as if they were all in the same family. An organization that trains people to do this is an army.

Wars and armies predated governments, but once governments came onto the scene, they proceeded to dominate the formation and use of armies. Governments seek to maintain monopolies on the use of force, and to that end, they usually suppress the development of private armies within their states.

Security (Internal)

One of the most important roles of the government is to provide security, and to enforce Law. The instruments that are used for this purpose are Police, the management of Identity documents, etc.

Economic security

Increasing complexities in society resulted in the formations of governments, but the increases in complexity didn't stop. As the complexity and interdependency's of human communities moved forward, economies began to dominate the human experience enough for an individual's survival potential to be affected substantially by the region's economy. Governments were originally created for the purpose of increasing people's survival potentials, and in that same purpose, governments became involved in manipulating and managing regional economies. One of a great many examples would be Wang Mang's attempt to reform the currency in favor of the peasants and poor in ancient China.

At a bare minimum, government ensures that money's value will not be undermined by prohibiting counterfeiting, but in almost all societies—including capitalist ones—governments attempt to regulate many more aspects of their economies. However, very often, government involvement in a national economy has more than just a purpose of stabilizing it for the benefit of the people. Often, the members of government shape the government's economic policies for their own benefits. This will be discussed shortly.

Social security

Social security is related to economic security. Throughout most of human history, parents prepared for their old age by producing enough children to ensure that some of them would survive long enough to take care of the parents in their old age. In modern, relatively high-income societies, a mixed approach is taken where the government shares a substantial responsibility of taking care of the elderly.

This is not the case everywhere since there are still many countries where social security through having many children is the norm. Although social security is a relatively recent phenomenon, prevalent mostly in developed countries, it deserves mention because the existence of social security substantially changes reproductive behavior in a society, and it has an impact on reducing the cycle of poverty. By reducing the cycle of poverty, government creates a self-reinforcing cycle where people see the government as friend both because of the financial support they receive late in their lives, but also because of the overall reduction in national poverty due to the government's social security policies--which then adds to public support for social security.

Healthcare

Governments play a major role (with importance varying from a country to another) in contributing to the health of the cititzens. This role includes funding (directectly or indirectly via subsidies) and even managing the healthcare system. It also intervenes by elaborating Laws aiming at protecting the health of the citizens.

Environmental security

Governments play a crucial role in managing environmental public goods such as the atmosphere, forests and water bodies. Governments are valuable institutions for resolving problems involving these public goods at both the local and global scales (e.g., climate change, deforestation, overfishing). Although in recent decades the economic market has been championed by certain quarters as a suitable mechanism for managing environmental entities, markets have serious failures and governmental intervention and regulation and the rule of law is still required for the proper, just and sustainable management of the environment.

Education

The government plays a central role in the education of the citizens. In particular it finances (directly or via subsidizing) a huge portion of the educational system (Schools, Universities, continuous education).

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