Originally posted by TzeentchThis is a great way to put it.
The role of government is to do what the people who created it and fund it tell it to do. At the end of the day, government is essentially a giant contractor agency hired by tax payers to provide a service.Anything beyond that definition is arbitrary political ideology nonsense. The real question for the purposes of this thread I is, I imagine, what services do western citizens pay their western governments to provide?
On a individual level peoples' ideas of which services the government should provide will differ, but since we live in a Democratic environment, voting statistics will can give us some insight on the what majority of citizens want. Some of the things we pay our government to do are: protect us from outside forces that may try to hurt us, maintain order within our borders, provide many basic necessities such as medical aid, food, water and power and sometimes housing, provide and maintain roads, bridges and other infrastructure and to regulate the economy and corporations so that people may provide for themselves with work. There's a lot more, but those are some basic ones.