perfidy

The deathmarch continues, with new entries from Foseti, Devin and Aretae.   A lot of static seems to be arising out of confusion over terminology.   Good government, strong government, weak government... But what does it all mean? I think we need to back away from the word good. The libertarian (we'll take Aretae as an example) feels that the government that governs least governs best. So, by definition, any government that exists, is bad. Maybe a slight exaggeration. Foseti, Devin, and Formalists feel that weak government is necessarily bad government.   So we mean different things when we say good. Obvious? All of our discussions on this center on three issues - whether a government is competent, whether it is strong, and whether or not it is interventionist. So, a three-axis rating could describe a government in a way we could all agree on; and then we argue over what is most important to the success, failure, or irrelevance of that nation and system.  A competent government makes good choices, does whatever it is charged with doing efficiently and well, and selects good leaders.  A strong government can make choices, enforce order, protect its territory, etc.  An interventionist government is one that sticks its fingers into all the orifices of the public, telling them what and where they can and cannot do things. So, our favorite so far seems to be late 18th Century England. How does it rank? I think we could fairly describe it as on the whole competent, strong and non-interventionist. (Could we replace small/big for interventionist? I don't know if that captures it. But a large government is going to need to do something with its time, and an interventionist-minded gov't is going to get big.) We might describe UK 1760 as a 10,10,0. Its opposite might be USSR 1990 - 0,0,10. Our current USG 2010 is perhaps a 5,5,7 and trending lower on the first two and higher on the last. We can quibble about the rankings if we like, but this would separate the idea of "good" from the other qualities we're discussing. Aretae can admit that a government is strong and competent without admitting immediately that it is good.