The oldest and simplest justification for government is as protector: protecting citizens from violence.

Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan describes a earth of unrelenting insecurity without a government to provide the safety of constabulary and order, protecting citizens from each other and from foreign foes. The horrors of little or no regime to provide that part are on global brandish in the world'south many delicate states and essentially ungoverned regions. And indeed, when the chaos of war and disorder mounts too high, citizens will choose even despotic and fanatic governments, such as the Taliban and ISIS, over the depredations of warring bands.

The thought of government as protector requires taxes to fund, train and equip an regular army and a police force; to build courts and jails; and to elect or appoint the officials to pass and implement the laws citizens must not suspension. Regarding strange threats, government as protector requires the ability to meet and treat with other governments too as to fight them. This minimalist view of government is conspicuously on display in the early days of the American Democracy, comprised of the President, Congress, Supreme Courtroom and departments of Treasury, War, Land and Justice.

Protect and provide

The concept of government every bit provider comes next: government every bit provider of appurtenances and services that individuals cannot provide individually for themselves. Government in this conception is the solution to commonage action bug, the medium through which citizens create public goods that benefit everyone, simply that are also subject to free-rider issues without some collective compulsion.

The basic economic infrastructure of human connectivity falls into this category: the means of physical travel, such as roads, bridges and ports of all kinds, and increasingly the ways of virtual travel, such as broadband. All of this infrastructure can exist, and typically initially is, provided by private entrepreneurs who meet an opportunity to build a route, say, and charge users a cost, but the majuscule necessary is then bang-up and the public benefit and then obvious that ultimately the authorities takes over.

A more expansive concept of regime as provider is the social welfare state: government can cushion the inability of citizens to provide for themselves, particularly in the vulnerable conditions of youth, quondam age, sickness, inability and unemployment due to economic forces beyond their command. As the welfare state has evolved, its critics have come to see it more equally a protector from the harsh results of capitalism, or possibly as a means of protecting the wealthy from the political rage of the dispossessed. At its best, withal, information technology is providing an infrastructure of intendance to enable citizens to flourish socially and economically in the aforementioned way that an infrastructure of competition does. It provides a social security that enables citizens to create their own economic security.

The future of government builds on these foundations of protecting and providing. Authorities will continue to protect citizens from violence and from the worst vicissitudes of life. Government will continue to provide public goods, at a level necessary to ensure a globally competitive economy and a well-performance society. But wherever possible, government should invest in denizen capabilities to enable them to provide for themselves in rapidly and continually irresolute circumstances.

Not surprisingly, this vision of government equally investor comes from a securely entrepreneurial culture. Technology reporter Gregory Ferenstein has polled leading Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and concluded that they "desire the government to exist an investor in citizens, rather than as a protector from commercialism. They want the government to heavily fund didactics, encourage more than active citizenship, pursue bounden international trade alliances and open borders to all immigrants." In the words of Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt: "The combination of innovation, empowerment and creativity volition exist our solution."

This commemoration of human capacity is a welcome antidote to widespread cynicism about the capacity of government to meet current national and global economic, security, demographic and ecology challenges. Put into practice, nonetheless, government every bit investor volition mean more than but funding schools and opening borders. If authorities is to assume that in the main citizens can solve themselves more efficiently and effectively than government can provide for them, it volition take to invest not just in the cultivation of citizen capabilities, only also in the provision of the resource and infrastructure to allow citizens to succeed at calibration.

Invest in talent

The most of import priority of government as investor is indeed education, but education cradle-to-grave. The first five years are particularly essential, every bit the brain development in those years determines how well children volition be able to larn and process what they learn for the rest of their lives. The regime volition thus take to invest in an entire infrastructure of child development from pregnancy through the beginning of formal schooling, including child diet and health, parenting classes, home visits and developmentally appropriate early education programmes. The teenage years are another catamenia of brain development where special programmes, coaching and family support are probable to be needed. Investment in educational activity will fall on arid ground if brains are not capable of receiving and absorbing it. Moreover, meaningful opportunities for continuing education must be available to citizens over the course of their lives, as jobs change rapidly and the acquisition of knowledge accelerates.

Even well-educated citizens, however, cannot alive up to their full potential as artistic thinkers and makers unless they have resources to work with. Futurists and business consultants John Hagel Three, John Seeley Brown and Lang Davison argue in The Power of Pull that successful enterprises no longer pattern a production according to abstract specifications and push information technology out to customers, just rather provide a platform where individuals can notice what they demand and connect to whom they need to be successful. If government really wishes to invest in citizen talent, it volition take to provide the same kind of "product" – platforms where citizens can shop intelligently and efficiently for everything from wellness insurance to educational opportunities to business licenses and potential business partners. Those platforms cannot simply be massive data dumps; they must be curated, designed and continually updated for a successful customer/citizens feel.

Finally, government every bit investor will have to notice a manner to be anti-scale. The normal venture capitalist approach to investment is to await ix ventures to fail and one to take off and scale up. For government, however, more small-scale initiatives that engage more than citizens productively and happily are ameliorate than a few large ones. Multiple family restaurants in multiple towns are ameliorate than a few big national chains. Woven all together, denizen-enterprise in every believable expanse can create a web of national economic enterprise and at least a good office of a social safety net. But government is likely to have to do the weaving.

A government that believes in the talent and potential of its citizens and devote a large portion of its tax revenues to investing in its citizens to aid them attain that potential is an attractive vision. It avoids the slowness and hierarchy of straight authorities provision of services, although efficient government units tin certainly compete. It recognizes that citizens are quicker and more creative at responding to modify and coming up with new solutions.

But government investment will have to recognize and accost the irresolute needs of citizens over their entire lifetimes, provide platforms to help them get the resources and make the connections they demand, and see a whole ready of public goods created past the sum of their deliberately many parts.