I. Introduction

Fundamentally and ideally, the purpose of government is to protect the basic rights of the people—life, liberty, and property. This is not a poetic aspiration but a strict moral boundary. Government possesses no inherent authority of its own; it justly exercises only those powers delegated to it by the people, and only for the purpose of securing rights that pre‑exist the state itself.

Yet no serious observer of history or modern society denies that governments routinely perform activities beyond this core function. Roads are built and maintained. Airports are built and managed. Schools are funded and administered. Welfare programs are created. Standards are set for activities said to affect public safety. These activities are often useful, sometimes even necessary in practice, and in many cases broadly supported by the public; however, they are also routinely found abusing their position and trampling the very rights they claim to serve.

The error is not that these activities exist. The error is failing to distinguish their moral basis from the government’s core role in protecting fundamental rights. When that distinction dissolves, governments inevitably overreach, overregulate, and convert cooperation into persecution, coercion, and abuse of power.

This essay argues that when governments confuse voluntary cooperation with delegated authority, useful services metastasize into coercive systems that undermine and combat the very rights government exists to protect.

II. Core Authority Versus Cooperative Utility

The most important distinction in political morality is the distinction between authority and utility.

Core Government Authority

The government’s legitimate authority arises only from authority delegated for the protection of individual rights. Because individuals possess the right to defend themselves against force, fraud, theft, injury, and invasion, they may collectively authorize an agent to do the same on their behalf. This includes the institution of courts, law enforcement, and military or militia defense.

All of these functions institutionalize the use of force and coercion in protecting fundamental rights. These functions are rights‑protective by nature. Coercion is morally justified only insofar as it prevents or remedies violations of fundamental rights.

This is the proper role of government.

The proper role of government must be expressly limited, narrowly defined, and kept in check by strict loyalty to just and eternal principles.

Most specifically, governments, rulers, and voters must be constantly reminded that governmental authority can only justly be maintained in defense of fundamental rights and in accordance with the cooperative will of the people to do good in accordance with divine law.  Anything and everything the government determines to do must be governed by the higher laws of God, not merely by what a few politicians think is a great idea.

The intended benefit rarely justifies the means, especially when corrupt political motives are involved, which is so often the case. But corruption, injustice, abuse, and evil can always be remedied when people honestly consider how implementing their ideas will affect fundamental rights and outcomes. This reality is not realized or addressed even 1% as much as it should in any aspect of life.

Extra‑Governmental Utility

By contrast, many functions commonly performed by governments are not derived from individual rights at all. No one has a natural right to a publicly funded road, a public school system, or a municipally managed utility paid for by others. These utilities and services arise from community coordination in the interest of mutual benefit and convenience, not moral necessity.

They are useful conveniences, not foundational rights or entitlements.

Their legitimacy rests not on delegated authority but on overwhelming public consent to cooperate.

Extra‑Governmental Functions are activities undertaken by the government that do not arise from the moral authority to protect individual rights, but instead from voluntary coordination, shared preference, and convenience.

This distinction is not semantic. It is essential to understand how governments remain moral, and how they so often cease to be.

III. Government as a Public Cooperative

When communities choose to use government structures to provide non-fundamental services, the government ceases to act as a sovereign authority. It is acting as a public cooperative, a logistical platform for managing shared conveniences that are difficult or inefficient to provide individually.

In this role, the government resembles:

• A cooperative association
• A trustee
• A service administrator
• A shared infrastructure manager

It does not resemble:

• A moral ruler
• A superior authority over conscience or conduct
• A rights-protecting institution

The moral basis of this role is consent, not compulsion. And critically, this consent is not a delegation of sovereign authority. It is permission to manage specific logistics—not a license to rule.

However, history reveals a predictable progression:

1. Voluntary coordination
2. Public enthusiasm
3. Institutionalization
4. Mandatory funding
5. Regulatory authority
6. Punitive enforcement

At step four, legitimacy dies. At step six, liberty is openly violated.

This pattern is not accidental. It is the natural consequence of confusing utility with authority.

There needs to be a fine line drawn between government actions based on the moral delegation of authority vs. cooperative management of services. This distinction dictates how force can ethically be used and how the administrative functions of government can or should be carried out.

IV. The Five Inescapable Questions of Extra‑Governmental Services

Once the government moves beyond rights‑protection into cooperative service provision, five unavoidable questions arise. These questions determine whether such arrangements remain legitimate or devolve into abuse:

1. How is the service funded?
2. What authority is claimed to administer it?
3. Who actually benefits?
4. What happens to those who opt out?
5. Does the institution allow multiple options for competing service providers?

Each question marks a moral boundary.

V. Funding: The Moral Limits of Compulsory Payment

Because extra-governmental services are not grounded in natural rights, they do not justify compulsory funding in the same manner as rights-protective functions. Funding, therefore, must satisfy a stricter moral standard.

Legitimate Funding Characteristics

• Transparent
• Proportional
• Closely tied to use or benefit
• Locally accountable
• Open to revision or withdrawal

Examples include:

• Usage fees
• Voluntary subscription participation
• Local assessments with easy opt-out
• Voluntary contractual participation

A community may also choose to support individuals who cannot easily help fund such services. That decision, however, must remain voluntary.

Illegitimate Funding Practices

Funding becomes illegitimate when it is:

• Indefinite and compulsory
• Bundled with unrelated programs
• Framed as entitlements that everyone must pay for rather than cooperative ventures that are voluntary
• Enforced through fines, property seizure, threat of injury by force, or imprisonment

When funding is detached from consent and enforced by threat, extra-governmental programs cease to be cooperative and become instruments of injustice.

For example, in today’s world, everyone shares the burden of funding public education, whether they use it or agree with it or not. Nobody has the right, or is entitled, to a free education—especially not one funded, controlled, managed, and provided by the state. If communities want to cooperatively join together in offering “free” public school options to their children, then they have every right to do so; but they do not have the moral right to force everyone within their communities to pay for it. Cooperative effort is voluntary, not coercive.

VI. Authority: Administration Without Coercion

Extra-governmental services require administrative authority, not civil authority.

This distinction is routinely violated.

Governments often smuggle coercive power into cooperative domains by:

• Writing binding regulations that ignore and often violate rights protection
• Imposing criminal penalties for non-participation
• Treating standards as commands rather than guidance
• Invoking “public safety” as an all-purpose justification for enforced universal compliance

In non-fundamental cooperative domains:

• Government has no inherent authority
• Its role is conditional and revocable
• Enforcement must be contractual or liability-based
• Compliance and participation must remain voluntary in principle

When the government claims sovereign authority over cooperative matters, it ceases to manage services and begins to rule people in disregard of fundamental rights.

VII. Beneficiaries: From Common Good to Captured Interests

Extra-governmental services are justified only to the extent that they provide a broad, voluntary, non-preferential benefit.

In practice, however, these services often drift toward:

• Bureaucratic self-preservation
• Corporate rent‑seeking
• Political patronage
• Ideological enforcement
• Regulatory capture
• Political and financial benefit of special interest groups and businesses
• Corruption, waste, administrative incompetence, and an institution that feeds on itself

VIII. The Opt‑Out Question: The True Test of Consent

The clearest test of legitimacy is simple:

What happens to those who opt out, cannot pay, or refuse to participate?

A morally sound system answers plainly:

• They retain full civil rights
• They are not criminalized
• They forgo the service, not their citizenship

If refusal results in penalties, loss of unrelated rights, or exclusion from ordinary life, then consent is illusory.

True cooperation permits refusal without reprisal.

IX. Does the Institution Permit Choice and Competing Service Providers?

Government programs and agencies are frequently characterized by low service quality, inefficiency, waste, fraud, corruption, and persistent mismanagement. These failures are not incidental; they are structural. Institutions insulated from competition, shielded from transparency, and staffed by administrators who are difficult or impossible to remove, predictably evolve to protect their own positions rather than the people they serve.

Within such systems, policy is often crafted not to improve outcomes but to preserve and increase budgets, expand authority, reduce accountability, and entrench institutional power. The absence of meaningful alternatives allows poor performance to persist without consequence to those at fault, while citizens are compelled to fund and endure inferior services regardless of cost or quality.

One of the most effective remedies for these failures is genuine choice. When individuals are free to select from multiple providers, public or private, services tend to become more efficient, more responsive, and more respectful of those they serve. Competition rewards competence and innovation while exposing waste and abuse.

For this reason, even when a community elects to coordinate services through government structures, it is in the public’s interest for those services to be open to competing providers. Contracting with or licensing private entities allows market discipline to replace bureaucratic insulation, aligning incentives with performance rather than permanence. Where choice exists, coercion diminishes, accountability increases, and service improves—not by mandate, but by necessity.

One common problem is that basic services are nominally “outsourced” or “licensed” to only one or two providers, with the claim that the market can only support a limited number of providers, which is rarely true.  Such arrangements create state-protected monopolies or oligopolies, where providers are guaranteed demand, insulated from failure, and freed from the discipline of performance. Under these conditions, quality stagnates, costs rise, and abuse becomes routine.

The problem is compounded when governments subsidize select providers. Subsidization distorts the market by allowing favored entities to operate at a loss, undercut competitors, or survive regardless of performance. Once subsidies are introduced, genuine competition becomes impossible. Providers are no longer rewarded for excellence but for political alignment, regulatory compliance, or institutional favoritism. What remains is not a market, but a managed cartel enforced by law.

If government is to coordinate services at all, legitimacy requires that licenses to operate be broadly available and governed by clear, limited, and realistically achievable standards. Licensing should exist only to prevent demonstrable harm to others, not to restrict entry, protect incumbents, or enforce conformity. Barriers to entry that exceed this purpose are not safeguards; they are instruments of control and abuse.

Equally important, no service provider should be subsidized by the government. All providers, public or private, must operate under the same conditions, bear their own costs, and succeed or fail based on quality, price, and trust. Only in such an environment can competition function as a genuine correction to bureaucratic stagnation and abuse.

Where real choice exists, coercion diminishes, accountability increases, and service improves—not by mandate, but by necessity. Where choice is restricted through limited licensing or subsidy, the state does not merely provide services; it manufactures dependency, entrenches power, promotes low quality, and suppresses or eliminates alternatives.

X. The Free‑Rider Objection Reconsidered

Critics often object that voluntary systems fail because of free‑riders. They argue that if people are not forced to pay taxes to fund basic services, many will not, and the financial burden will fall on the few. But the reality is that most essential services can easily be distributed based on use. If you want water, electricity, natural gas, or waste removal, you must pay for them. The only question here is whether you have multiple provider options. Ideally, having multiple providers would be best, but in some cases, it is just not practical. But as far as I know, nobody’s water bill is exorbitant because there is only one provider. On the other hand, the issue here is not the number of choices, but the freedom of entrepreneurs to offer additional options if they think they can do better.

The only case in which having multiple service options available is physically impossible is roads and transportation infrastructure. But these services could be easily paid for with a tax on other utilities like water, gas, and electricity. And/or offer special benefits to citizens who choose to pay an annual Infrastructure Tax, as will be discussed in the next section.

XI. Voluntary Community Provision and Tiered Benefits

A community may provide shared conveniences—such as roads, schools, and parks—without converting them into coercive entitlements.

The moral key is voluntary funding paired with proportional benefit.

Voluntary Funding Models

• Voluntary contributions or subscriptions
• Usage-based fees
• Local improvement associations
• Endowments and donor-funded institutions

Those who cannot or choose not to contribute are not punished. They may forgo benefits, not rights.

Tiered Benefits Without Rights Violation

A cooperative may offer additional benefits to contributors, such as:

• Priority access or enhanced services
• Additional voting credits

Such influence applies solely to cooperative administration—not to criminal law, civil rights, or political representation.

Charity Without Compulsion

A community may voluntarily extend services to children, the elderly, the disabled, or the impoverished. But charity ceases to be charity when enforced. Compassion compelled by force is moral fraud.

Additional Voting Credits

Those who choose to pay the voluntary tax to fund Transportation Infrastructure could be offered an additional voting credit in elections. And those who choose to fund Public Education and Parks should get to vote on related matters. This is an equitable system.

Those who have demonstrated the wisdom, maturity, and fiscal responsibility to help fund such programs should gain greater influence in governmental matters, such as additional voting credits. Those who choose not to, either because they can’t afford it or because it is not important to them, should get only one voting credit, at best.

Many people think that voting is a fundamental right that everyone should enjoy. But you should ask yourself: Do you really want to allow just anyone a voice in deciding how government is to be run? Do you want people who are ignorant, foolish, lazy, and fiscally irresponsible to have a hand in government? If you do, or if you think that is appropriate, you will find that such an approach will inevitably lead to an ineffective and abusive government. Wise people will select wise men as their rulers. Foolish and lazy people will select rulers who offer them unearned benefits, paid for by legalized plunder. Therefore, efforts should be made to give wise people the greatest authority in determining who governs and what the laws of the land are.

XII. Building Codes, “Public Safety,” and the Erosion of Property Rights

Few areas better illustrate extra-governmental abuse than modern building codes. What began as narrow safeguards against clear external harms has expanded into regimes that effectively control private property without owning it.

The Safety Pretext

Many codes:

• Do not prevent rights violations
• Do not address the risk of harm to others
• Override informed consent
• Criminalize harmless self-sufficiency

A man building a cabin on his own land, or a family choosing unconventional materials, violates no rights. Yet such actions are often treated as crimes.

Property Without Use Is Theft by Other Means

Property rights are meaningless if use is severed from ownership.

When governments mandate permits for harmless improvements, prohibit alternative building methods, or forbid occupancy based on arbitrary rules, they nullify property ownership rights.

This is legalized theft. It is gross governmental abuse.

The Moral Boundary

Government may intervene only where property use clearly and directly violates the rights of others. Beyond that, regulation becomes paternalism—and paternalism becomes tyranny.

If a building code cannot survive as voluntary guidance, contractual standard, or as a liability-based remedy, it rests not on safety but on force.

Perhaps it is appropriate to enforce safety-based building codes for the construction of public-use structures, but these safety standards need to be very general and nonrestrictive in determining how individuals develop and control private property limited to private use.

For example, if someone wants to live off-grid, on their own property, they should be entirely at liberty to do so. You shouldn’t need a building permit to construct a shed or be required to install a septic system to live in an RV on your own land.

All governmental codes and programs may be evaluated with one question:

If participation were truly voluntary, would it still be universally advisable and defensible?

If the answer is no, it needs to be reevaluated and revamped so that it makes sense, is not abusive of fundamental rights, and actually enhances liberty and prosperity. So often, governments pass laws and institute programs without rigorous cross-examination of questions relating to fundamental rights, the best benefit, and the best outcome. This is what happens when politicians, not wise statesmen, are placed in government.

XIII. Conclusion: The Proper Place of Extra-Governmental Functions

Extra-governmental services are not inherently illegitimate. They may be useful, appropriate, and widely desired. But they need to be evaluated and administered in accordance with ethical, equitable, and wise principles.

They remain morally acceptable only when:

• Funding is consensual
• Authority is appropriately limited
• Benefits are proportional
• Opt‑out remains real and penalty-free
• Fundamental rights are respected and protected

In all political matters, we need to always remember that the fundamental purpose of government is to protect the basic rights of the people—life, liberty, and property. This is not a loose suggestion but a strict moral boundary. Government possesses no inherent authority of its own; it justly exercises only those powers delegated to it by the people, and only for the purpose of securing rights that preexist the state itself. Anything beyond that needs to be entirely voluntary and cooperative.

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