limited government examples

limited government examples

Examining the Significance of Limited Government: A Comparative Study of Historical and Contemporary Examples

1. Introduction to the Concept of Limited Government

The notion of a limited government dates to ancient Greece and Rome, and direct contributions to the concept come from later Western philosophers, especially John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and the Founding Fathers of the United States. In developing economies and poor nations in general, the philosophy of limited government has a relatively short history. As many of these countries evolve from a largely stateless society to the modern institutional structure and regulatory mechanism in its government, the process is colored by the enthusiasm for collective action in the area of providing basic necessities such as education, health, and infrastructure. It is not, a priori, clear what specific institutional forms and governance mechanisms are best suited to the rapid changes confronting these societies. The success of such nations in managing this evolution will profoundly affect the course of the developing world and the world at large in coming decades.

The concept of a limited government is central to the understanding of the rules of the game in a democratic polity. An important feature of developing countries, particularly the large, populous, and relatively poor countries, is the high political demand for more governmental power. This preference for governmental power might significantly influence the organization and operations of the institutions of government and the direction of government policy, especially when the government structure and the policy domains are taking final shape. An analysis of this preference and its implications supplies valuable insights into the present and the future state of the respective countries of interest.

2. Historical Examples of Limited Government

Commerce was recognized in the Code as a legitimate way of making a fortune, as a residual of Roman law. Money lenders were active, especially after Jews came under the protection of the Code. Whether the king wanted to maintain large garrisons to keep the provinces under control or not, he had to tax like mad. As with medieval and Renaissance Europe, these taxes were set according to feudal services. All warriors, either noble or knight, served the king on horse, therefore all properties were liable to service. The most significant difference in the way the taxes were set was that the House of Lords had to approve every decision of the monarch before it was implemented.

The Visigothic Code is one of the most ancient examples of what could be classified (for our purposes) as a limited government. The Visigoths arrived in Hispania, sacked Rome, and set up the Visigothic Kingdom, which had a slow but steady rate of conquest over several centuries, reducing the size of the Byzantine, Ostrogothic, and other barbarian kingdoms. In the 13th century, the Pope released a bull authorizing the Christianization of the lands of these Visigoths, who remain today an ethnic elite. The king formed his model of limited government. The king played the role of a primus inter pares during the civil war, which characterized the disintegration of the Roman Empire. When the wars were over, the king had to maintain large standing armies, compensate his nobles for following him into battle, and keep them in line.

3. Contemporary Applications of Limited Government

Yet far from being a settled question in need only of clarification, the nature of the post-war expansion of government and the extent to which such expansion provides the citizenry with the protection of guarantees institutional or constitutional in form from the coercive demands of various organized special interests is a topic that is likely to remain the significant and enduring issue of government in our time. It is a question so important that we should want to know whether any particular notion of limited government at one point in time (e.g., 1787) might be relevant to understanding the protection of individual rights and the use and impact of political institutions in entirely different settings many years later in history and far from the United States. Even more important is our interest to know what the concept of limited government might add, if anything, to a large and important body of post-war literature on the necessity of majoritarian, democratic rules and the relationship of such rules to the expansion of government.

Collective bargaining and interest-group legislation become indiscriminate forces when incorporated into a democratic political system marked by an absence of constitutional or institutional guarantees for the protection of individual rights. At the same time, it is the very ignorance or denial of these guarantees to residents of underdeveloped democracies and totalitarian states that enables many contemporary American elites to resolve the very same deep concern over political action and individual rights by advocating policies that would mark a reconstitution of American government into what in the history of democratic political thought would appear as the classical, limited democratic state of the pre-Federalist era. In short, the return of the limited democratic state in the contemporary (urban public) policy debate in the United States leads to a form of government that looks very much like a military dictatorship, or the defunct Beneš dictatorship of 1938-9, or the eighteenth-century Pennsylvania legislature during the property crisis of the late 1780s.

4. Benefits and Challenges of Implementing Limited Government

Thus, this paper asks the following question: If a limited government is so beneficial and powerful, then why doesn’t every government adopt such a system? Why do nations today seek to equate limited and constitutional government? Why were the Greeks and the Romans the only ancient societies to establish such systems? Why was such a governance form absent in Western Europe following the fall of the Roman Empire? More pertinent to the current age, why has limited government faced such a pernicious decline over the last century to the point where it represents an arcane and virtually unheard of abstract term to modern political scientists? These are all very complex and multi-faceted questions to which I aim to provide an answer.

This analysis will examine how the different forms of limited government might take. In doing so, it will evaluate both historical instances of limited government and modern-day governance structures, taking into account the processes and institutions which structure human interactions within and between these entities. Specifically, this analysis will be structured around two main sections: the first will explore some of the advantages inherent to governing through a limited government – in effect, the benefits of preventing an overreaching government. The second, in comparison, will explore some of the specific challenges which occur when attempting to create and run a limited government. The analysis will then conclude in Section III, which summarizes the major insights learned in the prior sections and offers some general rules about how to create and run an effective and efficient limited government.

5. Conclusion and Future Implications

Thus, there is an important issue to understand how limited government is defined in different societies and which factors – as individualistic, cultural, and historical – influence the perception of limited government. What we can learn from the discourse – both theoretical and empirical – on individual liberty in historical and contemporary examples? The critical question is to identify those important dimensions that practically differentiate one polity from another with respect to limited government. In order to investigate this, we explore how the current examples describe limited government against the backdrop of selected historical examples.

This paper examines the significance of limiting the jurisdiction of government to protect individual liberty and the rule of law. It provides a comparative study of the historical and current limitations of government in different countries. This study concludes that the power of controlling and regulating the three powers of the State must be strictly delimited and separated from each other, in order that the liberty and welfare of the people may be effectively secure. The study further discusses the importance of individual liberty, implying that we all recognize the fact that the best interests of the nation can be secured only by the fullest exercise of freedom consistently with the observance of order, decorum, and personal propriety, and regard for the rights of others.