The oldest and simplest justification for government is as protector: protecting citizens from violence.

Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan describes a globe of unrelenting insecurity without a government to provide the prophylactic of law and gild, protecting citizens from each other and from strange foes. The horrors of trivial 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 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 thought of government every bit protector requires taxes to fund, train and equip an army and a police forcefulness; 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, regime every bit protector requires the ability to run into and treat with other governments as well as to fight them. This minimalist view of authorities is conspicuously on display in the early days of the American Republic, comprised of the President, Congress, Supreme Court and departments of Treasury, State of war, State and Justice.

Protect and provide

The concept of authorities as provider comes next: government as provider of appurtenances and services that individuals cannot provide individually for themselves. Government in this conception is the solution to collective activity problems, the medium through which citizens create public goods that benefit everyone, but that are also subject to free-rider problems without some commonage compulsion.

The basic 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 exist, and typically initially is, provided past private entrepreneurs who see an opportunity to build a road, say, and charge users a toll, but the capital necessary is so great and the public benefit so obvious that ultimately the government takes over.

A more expansive concept of government as provider is the social welfare country: government can cushion the inability of citizens to provide for themselves, particularly in the vulnerable atmospheric condition of youth, old age, sickness, disability and unemployment due to economic forces beyond their command. Equally the welfare state has evolved, its critics accept come to see it more every bit a protector from the harsh results of capitalism, or perhaps as a means of protecting the wealthy from the political rage of the dispossessed. At its all-time, however, it is providing an infrastructure of care to enable citizens to flourish socially and economically in the same mode 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. Government will continue to protect citizens from violence and from the worst vicissitudes of life. Government will continue to provide public goods, at a level necessary to ensure a globally competitive economy and a well-performance society. But wherever possible, authorities should invest in citizen capabilities to enable them to provide for themselves in rapidly and continually irresolute circumstances.

Not surprisingly, this vision of government every bit investor comes from a deeply entrepreneurial culture. 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 capitalism. They want the authorities to heavily fund teaching, 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 celebration of homo capacity is a welcome antidote to widespread pessimism most the capacity of authorities to encounter current national and global economic, security, demographic and environmental challenges. Put into practice, however, government as investor will hateful more than just funding schools and opening borders. If regime is to assume that in the master citizens tin solve themselves more efficiently and effectively than government can provide for them, it volition have to invest not simply in the cultivation of citizen capabilities, only besides 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 as investor is indeed education, only education cradle-to-grave. The first five years are specially essential, as the brain development in those years determines how well children will exist able to learn and process what they acquire for the rest of their lives. The government will thus take to invest in an entire infrastructure of child development from pregnancy through the first of formal schooling, including child nutrition and health, parenting classes, dwelling visits and developmentally appropriate early on education programmes. The teenage years are some other period of encephalon development where special programmes, coaching and family unit support are likely to be needed. Investment in education will autumn on barren ground if brains are not capable of receiving and absorbing it. Moreover, meaningful opportunities for continuing education must be available to citizens over the class of their lives, as jobs modify speedily and the acquisition of knowledge accelerates.

Even well-educated citizens, however, cannot live up to their total potential every bit creative thinkers and makers unless they have resources to work with. Futurists and business consultants John Hagel III, John Seeley Brown and Lang Davison argue in The Power of Pull that successful enterprises no longer design a production co-ordinate to abstract specifications and push it out to customers, but rather provide a platform where individuals can find what they demand and connect to whom they need to exist successful. If government really wishes to invest in citizen talent, it will have to provide the same kind of "product" – platforms where citizens can shop intelligently and efficiently for everything from health insurance to educational opportunities to business organisation licenses and potential business partners. Those platforms cannot simply exist massive data dumps; they must exist curated, designed and continually updated for a successful client/citizens feel.

Finally, authorities as investor will have to find a mode to be anti-scale. The normal venture backer approach to investment is to await nine ventures to fail and one to accept off and scale upwards. For government, all the same, more pocket-size initiatives that engage more citizens productively and happily are better than a few large ones. Multiple family restaurants in multiple towns are ameliorate than a few big national chains. Woven all together, citizen-enterprise in every conceivable expanse can create a web of national economic enterprise and at to the lowest degree a proficient function of a social safety net. Only government is likely to accept to practise the weaving.

A regime 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 assistance them attain that potential is an bonny vision. It avoids the slowness and bureaucracy of directly government provision of services, although efficient regime units tin certainly compete. It recognizes that citizens are quicker and more creative at responding to alter and coming upwards with new solutions.

But authorities investment will have to recognize and address the irresolute needs of citizens over their unabridged lifetimes, provide platforms to aid them get the resource and make the connections they need, and see a whole set of public goods created by the sum of their deliberately many parts.