Country (Part 5 in a series.)

When a Community of communities comes together for their mutual benefit and security, you have states and ultimately countries. A diverse group of individuals, families, and communities joined together with a core common principle: The expression of self, exercised in the security of an ever-widening web of Family for the benefit of those the self encounters. Whether others actively help the individual along their path of personal and familial growth is not important. What is important is that the ever greater Community does not actively impede the growth and expression unnecessarily.

The Country exists for the benefit of the individual, not the other way around. The primary objective of the Country should be the protection of its constituent members. Keep away those who would destroy or wantonly impede those members. Provide, but only in the instance of a last resort, for the succor and preservation of any constituent sub-unit of the Country. It is not the role of the Country to declare what color blanket a newborn child should be wrapped in, what manner of final disposal a newly deceased citizen should have, nor how any of a nearly uncountable number of choices should be made between those two life defining events.

The Country that is serving its citizens best is the Country that is serving its citizens least, and even then only when the service is desired and desirable. If two neighbors determine it is mutually beneficial to them to bridge the river between their properties, then in most cases it is best to leave it to them to amass their resources, affect the desired construction, and mutually reap the attendant benefits. Who is well served when the government steps in and builds that bridge for them, but also paves over their respective properties and renders their homesteads all but useless? Help is not at all helpful when it destroys that which it is purported to serve. As the scope of governments grows, an inverse square law of decreasing common sense would seem to apply. Those closest to the problem usually have the best answers, and are too often the least listened to when an ever more distant and disconnected government involves itself.