A government is “the organization, that is the governing authority of a political unit,” “the ruling power in a political society,” and the apparatus through which a governing body functions and exercises authority. “Government, with the authority to make laws, to adjudicate disputes, and to issue administrative decisions, and with a monopoly of authorized force where it fails to persuade, is an indispensable means, proximately, to the peace of communal life.”

This is a rather lengthy excerpt of a popular definition of government. There is more: A state of sufficient size and complexity will have different layers or levels of government: local, regional and national. Where state makes this partial statement of what government is even more complicated.

A state is a political association with effective sovereignty over a geographic area. These may be nation states, sub-national states or multinational states. There are no less than six words in the state “partial definition” just stated that can make even this short statement almost meaningless without defining the long words in the previous two sentences.

All that just to indicate that the term government is much more complicated once we began to dissect any definition of it.

One ramification of all the complexity of “government” is that usually there are several layers of control from different governmental jurisdictions that affect any major project and often very minor projects or actions or even proposed actions sometimes. A proposed action might be the sign that must usually be placed in a store window for a public meeting to voice views on making that store a liquor store.

Our first article deals with the problems of urban conservation and the issue of getting the different governmental agencies or jurisdictions to work together to solve urban conservation problems.

Click links below for more information on Government

    Our Unresponsive Government

    Tyranny

    Property Rights