Government Power

If one supports government having power to do something you want it to do, then one must bear in mind that once government has such power that it also can use that same power to do something you don’t want government to do. It is ridiculous to think that government will use power to only do what you want it to do.

Thus, the need to greatly limit the power of government to the bare minimum necessary for an orderly society.


As Frank S. Meyer put it:

The state therefore has two natural functions, functions essential to the existence of any peaceful, ordered society: to protect the rights of citizens against violent or fraudulent assault, and to judge in conflicts of right with right. It has a further third function, which is another aspect of the first, that is, to protect its citizens from assault by foreign powers. These three functions are expressed by three powers: the police power, which protects the citizen against domestic violence; the military power, which protects the citizen against violence from abroad; and the courts of law, which judge between rights and rights, as well as sharing with the police power the protection of the citizen against domestic violence.
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But since this institution must possess a monopoly of legal physical force, to give to it in addition any further power is fraught with danger; that monopoly gives to the state so much power that its natural functions should be its maximum functions.

- Frank S. Meyer, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo, published in 1962