The government as an instrument of the average person? I find the notion absurd on the face of it. Maybe it's the instrument of a small group of people who or

The government as an instrument of the average person? I find the notion absurd on the face of it. Maybe it's the instrument of a small group of people who originally came from a group of people you could call "average", and maybe it has some incentive to do visible things that make it appealing to a majority of the citizenry. But by no means can a random average person say, "I want the government to do X", and cause the government to do X for them, except in a very restricted class of X's (like "arrest this person who I see doing Y crime"). If it happens that a majority of average people want Z, maybe this will influence some politicians at some point, or maybe it won't. (It's sort of similar to the market incentive companies face, but worse in various ways.) Furthermore, just because you can use an institution to do some things for you (if you can call that "being your instrument") doesn't mean you have nothing to fear from it. It does not follow, especially not in the case of the government. More or less every person who's been oppressed by a government could nevertheless say it was providing police and other services to them. If the government were the average person's instrument, as in, a piece of machinery that didn't do anything unless an average person picked it up and used it, and in that case performed exactly the actions the person wanted, then your conclusion would follow [barring accidental misuse and such]. I'm tempted to imagine that you're deliberately giving HN readers an exercise in how to recognize the misleading use of language in a debate. While I'm on the subject, I'll volunteer that the social contract is a nice-looking facade made up after the fact; it's more like, the government does things to everyone, and afterward maybe a few people decide it was worth it and approve, while others may be displeased but usually lack any effective means of changing the situation, and shrug and put up with it. Further, I'll quote Nock: "The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner. ... Moreover, the sole invariable characteristic of the State is the economic exploitation of one class by another. In this sense, every State known to history is a class-State. Oppenheimer defines the State, in respect of its origin, as an institution "forced on a defeated group by a conquering group, with a view only to systematizing the domination of the conquered by the conquerors, and safeguarding itself against insurrection from within and attack from without. This domination had no other final purpose than the economic exploitation of the conquered group by the victorious group.""