What is the Role of Government in Amercian Society?

Written and read by Mayasonette Lambkiss

for the podcast show of

The Institute of Universal Human Rights - Hawaii

SPACESUIT MADE OF FLESH

1/18/2024

The role of government in American society is a matter of balance between what the members of society expect the government to do, and what they do not want the government to have the right to do.

First, we need to distinguish between federal, state, and local governments.

As citizens we established, we have rights and responsibilities towards our society. We all have the unalienable right to life, but we have the responsibility to register our identity with the DMV. We all have the same legal human rights, but different individuals will understand, interpret, and consent differently. Degrees of compliance will result in different behaviors, and often interfere with other people's rights, may even violate them as such. It is the government's job to regulate the different individual's behavior and distinguish acceptable from not acceptable behavior. It is also the government's job to balance individual freedom with the common good and public welfare and take this exact same context to the level of organizations, business entities, communities. It is the government's job to face and manage challenges that stand in the way of safe and healthy living of people, like environmental, economic, national safety challenges.

While a capitalist free market economy and the society created by it does not leave a ceiling on wealth creation and revenue access to preserve freedom, redistribution of wealth and revenue must be regulated to protect the exact same freedom. It is the job of the government to balance the scales of redistribution with equal access. By equal access we mean to find ways to create opportunities like education for the disadvantaged individuals to elevate their predisposition, benefits like welfare to see them through tough times, and resources like taking a hike in your favorite national park, use of libraries and facilities, microloans for business startups. But it is not the Government's job to decide if someone is too rich, take their wealth and redistribute money to the poor people.

It is the government's job to educate its citizens about their rights and responsibilities, the functions of democracy and republic and how they work together and protect their rights and democratic voice within that society. It is also the responsibility of the government to keep its citizens informed of formal democratic process participation opportunities like voting dates. It is the government's purpose to apply the democratic, administrative, and legal decisions the collective has made to daily life. Therefore, the government is a secondary decision maker and manager of the running of life of society. The government is created to regulate society and not to interfere in the life of the individual if the citizen has not violated any laws. The same principle applies to organizational and business entities as incorporated members of society.

Having all that said, the "If the right to live and be free is natural, then the government are doing wrong when they are protecting your rights, and doing wrong when they violate your rights. As much possible then, the government should create rights that are compatible with and don't contradict your natural rights." (Prof. Aeon Skolbe, Bridgewater University, Libertarianism Explained: What Are Rights? Learn Liberty, YouTube, 2011 (3:46). Consequently, reasoning can lead us to understand the above statement, that the government can only do right by controlling as little as possible.

Civic rights and responsibilities are two arms of the same scale and in a healthy society they are on an equal level. If a citizen's rights are disregarded, unrecognized, or violated, his ability to contribute his responsibilities will suffer, simply will be disabled from offering his best to others. Therefore, I consider recognizing and respecting everyone's rights is the very foundation for expectations. Having unalienable rights, contractual rights, civic rights, moral rights are just a form of enabling each other for full participation in communal life. Pain and suffering of others is unconscionable discomfort, but it is also economically imprudent. It is also unwise to redistribute wealth without transforming monetary access into transformational resources, opportunities, benefits. Handing out money makes for very temporary band aids. By assessing and understanding the wider context of pain and suffering, especially if it is a collective phenomenon, it can lead us to insights into how solutions can help address problems. "It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking agency and will. It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them to objects of pity. This has never been clearer than in the view of Africa from the American media, in which we are shown poverty and conflicts without any context." - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, said it in her TED talk titled “The danger of a single story” in 2009. Who was also quoted by the Global Citizen after gaining her chieftaincy in Nigeria as a writer. Chimamanda here talks about the objectification of poverty as the result of contextual ignorance. It means relatability to what we observe increases by exploring the context. When we realize the solution is always as simple as the restoration of human dignity, we realize it is a cycle that can be remedied by contextual compassion. The basis for the emotion of compassion is relatability, and here we learn that relatability increases by more intimate knowledge of the context. Sociologists in any society therefore have a key role in solving the problems of redistribution by analysis the disadvantageous context for poverty and using that information to create access to the most useful benefits, resources, opportunities.

It is the government's job to then define the rights and responsibilities of citizens and systemize the coordination of both. Civic rights will be defined by the government based on universal human rights and decide the limitations of contructual rights. It is the government's job to collect on its citizen's responsibilities, whether it is monetary, service, or information, or democratic participation. The government is a power system that if functions and navigated correctly empowers its citizens, after all as in a healthy democracy, the power belongs to the People.

Aloha

Mayasonette