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What is the purpose of government?
Succinctly as possible, what is the purpose of government? And with genuine effort to avoid condescension or disparagement, what do you think someone politically opposite to you would say if they were to thoughtfully articulate an answer to the same question?
Step above the politics and look at it from a meta perspective. It's pretty simple - it's supposed to embody and support the 'social contract' of society. The patterns of behavior that the group chooses to live by. Everything else is more a discussion of 'which patterns', 'how to achieve them', and 'how to pay for it all'. That's where the arguments begin.
Also, there is another aspect that is usually regarded as subjective but could be more objective: what is the optimal path from where we are now to where we want to go?
It's like operating a power plant. Move too fast and too far and you risk wasting excess power or causing a power vacuum and everything collapsing in on itself. Move too slow and nothing seems to happen and you lose support in the next election. While the merits of control, anarchy, market-worship, and state-worship can be debated there is likely an optimal path that can be taken during the exploration of contradictory avenues--a dialectical vector: speed and angle.
But I guess this is just another aspect of social contract. Whether or not the baby-murdering machine actually exists you could still believe that it does and scream that it should be shut down immediately at the expense of everything else. I suppose this is the meta-meta wherein we are subject to the limits of the collective imagination--perhaps we are more at the whims of radical individuals than we would like to believe. If Montesquieu did not exist, I think the world would look quite a bit different.
The most frustrating part of the problem is that even if one were to incarnate a perfect social contract, it won't survive fifty years of contact with reality. Things fall apart, people change, tastes change, new things come along every day. Combine that with the challenges of scope creep, nepotism, laziness, the hard challenge of scaling past Dunbar's number, and just plain chaos mixed in by chance. Entropy is a harsh mistress.
This isn't a problem that can ever be 'solved', it can only be managed with variable degrees of success... at least until we get to something more akin to post-scarcity, if that's possible. Somehow we default to be in 'everything is always falling apart' mode and success happens 'exactly as everything comes together for the next step' so we can jump to the next rock.
That only works until we run out of rocks to stand on. Hard to learn to fly when you're always trying not to slip off and fall in the river.
A government is a person or group of people, within a larger population, who end up with a sufficient proportion of the group's ability to enact violence that they have a local monopoly of violence.
They don't so much have an inherent purpose as much as they are a phenomena that occurs over time as people win and people lose and some people snowball their power. It's like how wires tangle up in your pocket; the tangle doesn't have a purpose, but it is something that happens over time due to statistical mechanics.
In terms of what purpose I'd like them to have, preferably (and often typically) they reduce the overall amount of violence acted upon in the group, because they can set rules (and it is advantageous for them to do so) that other people in the group cannot be violent to each other, and cannot be violent towards the government, and it is a losing proposition to try to be violent towards the government, so people obey. Therefore, the threat of potential violence reduces the amount of perpetuated violence, which allows for said group of people to do things like invent technology, trade materials, and build architecture.
Yes, this is governance. Strength. A centralization and monopolization of control. Violence is not limited to physical intimidation but also psychological, emotional, economic, environmental and symbolic violence.
I suspect people with different views would be most likely to object to the bullet about social safety nets, about monopolizing violence, and about regulations and negative externalities.
I've always thought of government as, shortly, "how we do things" - the means by which we, a society, can do things on that scale. I don't like how people like to pit themselves against, or worse find themselves excluded by, the government because the government is us, at least when working as intended (though it too often doesn't). It's not something apart from us, it's made up of fellow people.
Less shortly, government - a state - is the way for a group of people to pool resources, collectively decide on responsibilities, and organise tasks in ways that could not be done by ad-hoc gatherings and that achieve things to benefit that entire group of people. I want people to think of government positively, as a structure and a tool that we can turn to our benefit, as a way to focus and organise collective action. I want people to strive to ensure that the people in any level of government, leaders or civil servants, work for that bigger picture.
Here’s a left-field idea: the only fundamental purpose of a government is to maintain its own existence.
What is the purpose of a corporation? A multicellular organism? When organizations reach a certain size and complexity, they become self-justifying.
Facilitate stability and have the monopoly on violence mostly.
People will have disagreements and issues, in the vast majority of governments, the only way you get to remove the rights of someone else is to have the government do it for you or approve of you doing so. If they don't, then you'll just have to deal.
This, in theory, can help with stability. Public works projects, knowledge that your money will spend, defense from your government being overthrown and turned into someone else's government, etc.
I tried to puzzle out if a government would even make sense without a monopoly on violence. Regulating anything becomes pointless without a way to enforce it, no matter how well-regarded a government might be, surely? The closest I can think of is large religious institutions like the catholic church: issuing moral edicts on all aspects of life and business that they can't directly enforce with violence (historical papal armies notwithstanding), but they often had enough soft power over governments that do hold monopoly on violence to have laws enacted, not to mention soft power over normal people in local communities. Collecting tithes, building public works and feeding people in need, all government-like activities. Even the opulent golden cathedrals...
I wonder if there's a comparable secular institution that I'm not thinking of.
EDIT: the mafia
Corporations, perhaps? Plenty of them have managed to gain local and regional monopolies on violence over the years too, some under the auspices of actual governments, but some effectively independent from them.
E.g. The Dutch East India Company and East India Company had royal charters but were acting as pseudo-sovereign states within their trade monopoly regions. Plantation estates the world over effectively had a monopoly on violence against their slaves. And even well after slavery was abolished, corporate controlled Banana Republics continued the trend against local populations. Ditto for "Company towns" in North/South America and Africa that trapped people in indentured servitude, had their own private police forces, and even their own independent currencies in many cases.
I mean I have a very wide definition somewhat unlike others in this thread because “what is government” can get odd fast.
There’s sub groups all over the world with some level of autonomy, and in regions like the Middle East and Africa that’s even more common.
There are some of these things where you could argue not just the government can inflict violence (I feel like some nations have allowed the religious leaders to do things like stone people without official government involvement).
There’s also situations like Mexico or Columbia with the drug cartels and other such institutions over the world.
And this is just in modern times. There’s probably plenty of even more unique stuff in history.
It’s why very general questions like the OP are kinda hard to give specific answers to. MOST governments have a rough and common framework more strict than what I said but not ALL
To arrange any centralised collective actions that a group of people wants or needs carried out. Wants such as medical care and research that can't be funded or supplied on the level of local communities, and needs such as military force that might have onerous costs but prevents the group from being outcompeted or subjugated by another group. It basically provides economy of scale. When it's good it will share the benefits equally and give everyone a fair say, when it's bad it will funnel all resources to a tyrant at the top. It might arrange collective action by delegating functions to private corporations that it regulates, or to local co-ops, or by directly managing these functions themselves, or any number of other arrangements.