What is the purpose of government?

In this election season, many of us are focusing on the personalities of the two candidates running for office. Americans are not asking the critical question: What is the purpose of government? The purpose of government is to protect your individual rights--life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If a candidate ran for office in our current political culture and said, “I will use the military to protect you from foreign invasion, ensure that the courts protect your ability to adjudicate disputes between each other, and will leave local police departments up to the people and the local governments that have oversight over such departments. Other than that, the government is not going to buy you health care, take care of your kids, buy you dinner, tell your local school what to teach. That’s up to you!”

As a result, we have two political candidates who literally are boring because they are stuck in a government-centered mindset. To me, government has always been boring to study--and I am a political science major. People don’t want to hear about fixing subsection (c) of this law or that law. People are relatively practical and they know when things work and when they don’t. They know Obamacare does not work. Do people know what a free-market solution to Obamacare would look like? Not really. Most people don’t think that far ahead. Plus, Republicans rarely explain things like that because they are tired, lazy, and too focused on their own political consultants who tell them to avoid these issues. I wonder when we will reach a point in time in which people are more focused on the larger issues of government rather than the imperfect people running for office and their unique personalities.