What is the Purpose of Government?

The other day a libertarian-leaning friend told me that he believed that the purpose of government was to protect us from each other, to protect us from foreign countries and to promote commerce.  I agree that these are all legitimate functions of government, but I think they fall short. 

For me, the purpose and legitimate function of government is set out in the Preamble to the Constitution which states:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

In the Federalist Papers, James Madison argued that the Constitution gave the government the power do whatever was necessary to carry out the purposes set out in the Preamble.  Both Madison and Hamilton were proponents of a muscular federal government.  

The Constitution goes on to enumerate specific powers, such as to coin money, to regulate interstate commerce and so on.  However, I think that those enumerations do not limit the broader purposes set forth in the Preamble.

I would go even further.   Before the Constitution, there was the Declaration of Independence.   The Declaration set out founding principles of this nation. In its Preamble, Thomas Jefferson wrote:

We hold these truths to be self-evident,  that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.   That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.  

Here we go to the very justification for government.  Government exists to to ensure that all men are created equal and to secure the unalienable rights of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.   

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When we take these two founding documents together, it is clear that the purposes of government include protecting us from each other and protecting us from foreign governments.   However, it also includes protecting the equality of citizens, perfecting the union that binds us together and promoting the general welfare.   There is also a strong commitment to justice and liberty.    

Often these purposes may compete against each other.   For example, requiring people to contribute to social security promotes the general welfare while taking away the liberty not to save for retirement.   Enacting regulations against dumping coal waste into rivers promotes domestic tranquility and the general welfare while protecting the right to life while it limits the liberty to pollute the environment.   While there will always be trade-offs, I think that government is acting properly when it promotes one of these core values without substantially limiting or destroying another core principle.  

Examining Islamist Terror Attacks in the United States

Donald Trump's justification for his executive order temporarily banning people from seven majority Muslim countries and refugees from coming to this country was to protect the United States from terrorist attacks.    Protecting the U.S. is a good thing but I wanted to look at the terror attacks that had taken place in the U.S. to see if the executive order would have prevented any of them.    

To do that, I looked for lists of terror attacks.  I started with Wikipedia, but their list seemed incomplete so I went to a website called Religion of Peace.   However, their list seemed overly broad.    I came up with the following criteria.   1.  It needed to be an attack on strangers.  The very nature of terrorism is that attacks are carried out on the general populace.   This cut out attacks on family members.   2.  It needed to be verifiable.   I could not find any confirmation on some of the incidents on Religion of Peace.  3.  It had to have been carried out by a Muslim who acted on religious grounds.   While I know this sounds obvious, Religion of Peace classified the Ft. Lauderdale shooter as a convert to Islam where this appears to be false.   

After filtering the attacks, I came up with a list of fourteen incidents starting with 9/11/01.  I started there because that was the beginning of the current war on terror.   This averages to approximately one per year. 

09/11/01   Nineteen al-Qaeda members hijacked four airliners killing 2,996 people.

07/04/02   A lone gunman killed two people and injured four others at the El Al ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport

07/28/06  A Muslim-American walked into a Jewish Center in Seattle, Washington and shot six women, one of whom died.

06/01/09   An American-born convert to Islam shot two soldiers, one of whom died, at a Little Rock recruiting station

11/05/09   An American-born psychiatrist killed 13 and wounded 33 at Ft. Hood, Texas

04/15/13   The Tsarnaev brothers plant bombs at the Boston Marathon, killing three and wounding 183

04/27/14   A man who claimed to be a jihadi shot a man in Skyway, WA.   He later shot two other men in Seattle and one in New Jersey.

10/23/14   A man armed with a hatchet attacked four officers in Queens, NY.

12/18/14   Teen convert to Islam killed an elderly neighbor in order to get money to buy an assault rifle and commit a mass shooting.  He was arrested before he could kill any more people.

05/03/15   Two men travel to Garland, Texas to attack a Draw Mohammed contest.  They wound one person before being killed.

07/16/15   A man attacked two military facilities in Chattanooga, TN killing seven and wounding two.

12/02/15   A husband and wife attack a workplace Christmas gathering killing 14 and wounding 22.  

06/12/16   An American-born Muslim killed 49 and injured 53 at a  gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

11/28/16    A Somali-born student injured eleven people in a car ramming and stabbing attack at Ohio State University.

Not counting 9/11, sixteen individuals committed thirteen attacks which killed ninety-five people. However, the majority of those were killed in the Fort Hood, San Bernadino and Orlando shootings.    

Who are these terrorists?   Ten out of sixteen were born in the United States.   An additional three came to the US as children with their parents.   One came to this country as a teenager and two came as adults.   The six foreign born terrorists came from Egypt, Kyrgystan, the former Soviet Union, Pakistan, Kuwait and Somalia.   Only one came from a country listen in President Trump's executive order and only one came as a refugee (the same person).   The others came on tourist visas (2), a fiance visa, as a derivative asylum seeker and one I couldn't figure out (who came with his family when he was five).

Of the ten U.S.-born attackers, three were converts to Islam.    

Six claimed allegiance to ISIL (or were claimed by ISIL).   One said he was sent by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsuela.   The rest did not have ties to any group.   

Three out of four perpetrators in the three most deadly shootings were born in the U.S.

What is striking to me is that only three out of sixteen terrorists came to this country as teenagers or adults over a fifteen year period.   This suggests to me that focusing our efforts on home-grown radicals will be more effective than trying to keep foreigners out.