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Government exists to provide infrastructure, enforce contracts, and basic protection.

1. Protection means people can operate day to day in reasonable safety. To see what like is like without minimal physical safety of self and property, look at Somalia or New Orleans during the flood.

2. Contracts need something backing them, whether central, guild, or local. If contracts aren't good, you can't have comerce. Without commerce, no city. Writing was developed to help this process, but such things were done on a word back to the beginning of time.

3. Infrastructure. This means basic building blocks of civilized life that are best provided on the large scale through centralized authority and paid for by taxes. It has meant things like roads, plumbing, a court system to protect items 1 and 2, ports, an army to repel invaders. In modern times it means electricity, clean water, public education, public health initiatives, vaccination programs, hospitals, state subsidized universities, and funding for basic research.

Why do I count education and things like health care? Because investing in healthy well educated people and research means investing in the economy's future and in the country's future. In economics, this is called investing in human capital.