Exploring Government’s Toolshed

Abstract

Well, what does government do, exactly? If a young child asked you this question, what would you say? Responding to that sort of naive query isn't simple, because there are so many possible ways in which it could be answered. Consider only three, out of a myriad of possibilities. One possible reply would be to try to describe what happens 'inside' government-how decisions are made, how orders are passed down the line, how information moves about. If we chose to answer the question in this way, we would be telling a story about government's decision processes. It is the kind of story that has become familiar through political diaries and memoirs. The story would be punctuated by telephone calls, emails and documents, interminable meetings, lights burning into the night, petty squabbles and jealousies, sex scandals, sleaze allegations, panics, heart attacks and nervous breakdowns, and actors of varying importance , competence and ambition. We would soon become immersed in all those interesting but elusive questions about power, influence, who-said-what-to-whom and when. Not a child's territory, exactly. But that is only one way of looking at what government does. A second type of answer might focus on the subjects in which governments today are interested, rather than on the arcane plottings in the chancellories. That would take us on to an entirely different tack. We would find ourselves trying to list everything that government nowadays concerns itself with, for one reason or another. Very quickly that list would become bewilderingly long and heterogeneous. From government's birth-control pills for cats in Denmark to its seals on domestic gas meters in Britain: government's spoor (its cloven hoof, some would say) appears everywhere. We would soon have to simplify, reducing the mass of specific interests down to a few major and general purposes that governments have, or say they have.