The oldest and simplest justification for regime is every bit protector: protecting citizens from violence.

Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan describes a world of unrelenting insecurity without a government to provide the condom of law and order, protecting citizens from each other and from foreign foes. The horrors of piffling or no government to provide that function are on global display in the world's many fragile states and essentially ungoverned regions. And indeed, when the anarchy of state of war and disorder mounts too high, citizens will choose even despotic and fanatic governments, such as the Taliban and ISIS, over the depredations of warring bands.

The idea of government as protector requires taxes to fund, train and equip an army and a police force; to build courts and jails; and to elect or appoint the officials to pass and implement the laws citizens must not break. Regarding foreign threats, government every bit protector requires the power to come across and treat with other governments too every bit to fight them. This minimalist view of government is conspicuously on display in the early days of the American Democracy, comprised of the President, Congress, Supreme Court and departments of Treasury, War, Land and Justice.

Protect and provide

The concept of government equally provider comes next: government as provider of appurtenances and services that individuals cannot provide individually for themselves. Authorities in this conception is the solution to commonage action problems, the medium through which citizens create public goods that do good anybody, but that are too subject to gratuitous-rider problems without some commonage compulsion.

The bones economic infrastructure of human connectivity falls into this category: the means of concrete travel, such equally roads, bridges and ports of all kinds, and increasingly the means of virtual travel, such as broadband. All of this infrastructure can be, and typically initially is, provided by private entrepreneurs who encounter an opportunity to build a route, say, and accuse users a price, but the capital necessary is so great and the public benefit so obvious that ultimately the authorities takes over.

A more than expansive concept of regime as provider is the social welfare state: government can cushion the inability of citizens to provide for themselves, particularly in the vulnerable weather of youth, old age, sickness, inability and unemployment due to economic forces across their control. As the welfare state has evolved, its critics have come up to encounter information technology more than as a protector from the harsh results of capitalism, or maybe equally a means of protecting the wealthy from the political rage of the dispossessed. At its best, nonetheless, it is providing an infrastructure of care to enable citizens to flourish socially and economically in the same way that an infrastructure of competition does. It provides a social security that enables citizens to create their own economic security.

The future of government builds on these foundations of protecting and providing. Authorities will proceed to protect citizens from violence and from the worst vicissitudes of life. Authorities will continue to provide public goods, at a level necessary to ensure a globally competitive economy and a well-functioning society. But wherever possible, government should invest in denizen capabilities to enable them to provide for themselves in speedily and continually changing circumstances.

Not surprisingly, this vision of government as investor comes from a deeply entrepreneurial civilization. Technology reporter Gregory Ferenstein has polled leading Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and ended that they "want the government to be an investor in citizens, rather than as a protector from commercialism. They desire the government to heavily fund education, encourage more active citizenship, pursue binding international trade alliances and open up borders to all immigrants." In the words of Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt: "The combination of innovation, empowerment and inventiveness will be our solution."

This commemoration of human capacity is a welcome antitoxin to widespread pessimism about the chapters of government to encounter current national and global economic, security, demographic and environmental challenges. Put into exercise, all the same, authorities as investor will mean more simply funding schools and opening borders. If government is to assume that in the main citizens can solve themselves more efficiently and effectively than government can provide for them, information technology will accept to invest not only in the cultivation of citizen capabilities, but also in the provision of the resource and infrastructure to allow citizens to succeed at scale.

Invest in talent

The most of import priority of government every bit investor is indeed pedagogy, but education cradle-to-grave. The first five years are particularly essential, every bit the brain evolution in those years determines how well children will be able to learn and process what they acquire for the residue of their lives. The government volition thus have to invest in an entire infrastructure of child evolution from pregnancy through the commencement of formal schooling, including kid nutrition and health, parenting classes, home visits and developmentally appropriate early on education programmes. The teenage years are another menses of brain evolution where special programmes, coaching and family support are probable to exist needed. Investment in educational activity volition fall on barren basis if brains are not capable of receiving and arresting it. Moreover, meaningful opportunities for standing pedagogy must be bachelor to citizens over the course of their lives, equally jobs modify speedily and the acquisition of cognition accelerates.

Even well-educated citizens, however, cannot live upwards to their full potential as creative thinkers and makers unless they have resource to piece of work with. Futurists and business consultants John Hagel III, John Seeley Brown and Lang Davison contend in The Power of Pull that successful enterprises no longer design a production according to abstruse specifications and push information technology out to customers, but rather provide a platform where individuals tin can find what they need and connect to whom they need to be successful. If government actually wishes to invest in citizen talent, it volition have to provide the same kind of "product" – platforms where citizens tin shop intelligently and efficiently for everything from health insurance to educational opportunities to business licenses and potential business concern partners. Those platforms cannot simply be massive data dumps; they must be curated, designed and continually updated for a successful customer/citizens experience.

Finally, government equally investor volition take to notice a way to be anti-scale. The normal venture capitalist approach to investment is to expect ix ventures to fail and one to take off and scale upward. For government, however, more small initiatives that engage more citizens productively and happily are better than a few large ones. Multiple family restaurants in multiple towns are amend than a few large national chains. Woven all together, citizen-enterprise in every conceivable area can create a spider web of national economical enterprise and at least a good part of a social rubber internet. Merely government is likely to have to do the weaving.

A authorities that believes in the talent and potential of its citizens and devote a large portion of its revenue enhancement revenues to investing in its citizens to help them accomplish that potential is an attractive vision. It avoids the slowness and hierarchy of direct government provision of services, although efficient government units can certainly compete. Information technology recognizes that citizens are quicker and more artistic at responding to change and coming upward with new solutions.

But regime investment will have to recognize and address the irresolute needs of citizens over their entire lifetimes, provide platforms to help them get the resources and make the connections they need, and encounter a whole set of public goods created by the sum of their deliberately many parts.