What is Government? pt. 2
Jun 19th, 2008 by Micah Tillman | 2 Comments |
That’s the question you have to be able to answer before you can really know for whom to vote. After all you wouldn’t want to hire a plumber who thought plumbing was a kind of art/sculpture, or a mechanic who thought automobile maintenance and repair were detailing and joy riding.
In the context of voting, therefore, the question takes on two sides: Do I know what government is? & Do candidates x, y, z know what government is?
And your ability to legitimately answer the latter depends, in large part, on your ability to truthfully answer the former in the affirmative.
I wonder if there are actually two questions floating around in the question “Do you know what government is?”
The first “Do you know what government should be?” ( Related questions: What’s the platonic form of government; what was it intended to be; how best would a theoretical government work)
The second is “Do you know what the government actually is right now?
Presuming their is a gulf between question 1 and question 2, working on the assumption that it has drifted/mutated/been perverted from what it should be doing, it seems like an ideal politician would have a plan for getting us from where we are to where we should/ want to be.
Isn’t it always easier to create more questions than answer the old ones?
;)
It’s called “exploring the idea,” Jeff, not “creating more questions than answering the old ones,” and it has a long and noble intellectual tradition. *grin*
I think you’re right that most people think about this issue in these terms, if they think about it at all.
But I don’t care for the moment what an ideal (Plato) or excellent (Aristotle) government would be, or what government should do, etc. I want to know what makes both the best and worst governments (both George Washington’s and George W’s, for instance) recognizable as a government.
Another way of putting it: what is it about the things we call “governments” that makes it legitimate to call them “governments” even though some of the are juntas, others are representative republics, others are dictatorships, others are communist, others are monarchies, etc.