Government: Dos and Donts

Let me define some terminologies in the beginning.

Government (sarkaar): Most of the tasks that government does, comes out of tax money.

Voluntary collective (samaaj): People supporting a cause who come together, pool money and work for the cause. Unlike the taxes collected by government under threat of a gun, the contribution to the collective is entirely voluntary. Example: Ramkrishna Mission, Resident Welfare Associations, etc.

Market (bazaar): Profits in free markets drive this entity. No coercion, only earning through customer satisfaction.

I prefer to restrict the government to as few areas as possible. Primarily because the government is inefficient by design. Government spending means spending someone else's money (taxes) on somebody else (citizens). As Milton Friedman described here, this is the most wasteful way to spend money, regardless of the government's honest intent.

Also, there is one area where the government is indispensable: the application of force. I do not feel comfortable with the monopoly of violence residing in private hands.

Hence, using the above two constraints, the acceptable government tasks are those which need some form of physical coercion/force for the greater good. And the government having a monopoly on violence is ideally suited to perform those. Like the police, military, judiciary, enforcements of contracts, community discipline in case of a pandemic, etc.

I want to explain the activities of my ideal government with some examples:

Task	Responsibility
Impoverished seniors	Voluntary collective
Military spending	Government
Community health, pandemic	Government
Education for poor	Voluntary collective
Helthcare for poor	Voluntary collective
Homelessness	Voluntary collective
UBI	Voluntary collective
Bail out industry	Market. Industry should create its own rainy day buffer out of its profit/initial investment. If no longer feasible to run the industry, shut it down.
Regulatory Agencies. RBI, IRDA, CSRIL, RERA	Government. It is government's job to prevent chaos across industries such as Finance, Insurance Real estate. Thanks to Ashutosh for this point.
Non intrusive testing/tracing capabilities for pandemic management	Government. This is public-health-issue, as opposed to personal healthcare. But I cannot imagine any government building a tracking/tracing capability which it won't misuse by invading into citizen privacy. Honouring privacy requires ethics of the highest order, and no government can maintain high ethics.

None of the ideas is my original. It is a synthesis of ideas that I picked up over the years from Swaminomics, Atanu Dey, Gurucharan Das, Paul Graham, Ayn Rand, Amlan Dutta, Ashok Desai.