Quote from: myrkul on May 14, 2013, 07:24:07 PM

Quote from: Hawker on May 14, 2013, 07:14:43 PM

Governments do not exist to provide services to their citizens. They exist because their citizens want a safe environment with clear laws and will use violence to ensure they get that. It's not a service - you can't decide that you don't want it.

I respectfully disagree, as did several gentlemen some 230-odd years ago:

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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,

That "safe environment" is the service which governments ostensibly exist to provide.

I don't know about yours, but mine put it in their "mission statement":

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We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Mine came over with men with pointy sticks on horses, killed anyone who disagreed and the 1% still has the families who took the land in 1066. They didn't leave a mission statement.