A government is a body that has the power to make and enforce laws within an organization or group. In the broadest sense, government means to manage or supervise, whether over an area of land, a set of people, or a collection of assets. The primary duty of a government is to reward the people who do good things and punish the wrongdoers.
There are a wide range of theories about the reasons for establishing governments. There are four major reasons for establishing a government: greed and oppression, order and tradition, natural rights, and social contract.
Greed and Oppression
Many political viewpoints that are opposed to the existence of a government (such as Anarchism), as well as others, give emphasis to the historical roots of governments and the fact that governments originated from authority who took, by force, certain regions of land as their own. Once they took that land they began to exercise authority over the people of that land. It is argued that governments exist to enforce the will of the strong and dominate the weak.
Order and Tradition
Various types of conservatism generally see the government as a positive power that conveys order out of chaos, establishes laws to end the war against all people, punishes vice while encouraging moral virtue, and respects tradition. At times, in this view, the government is seen as something ordained by a higher power, such as a king, which human beings have a duty to obey.
Natural Rights
The basis for the theory of government shared by most branches of liberalism is natural rights. In this view, human beings are born with certain natural rights, and governments are established to protect those rights. What the natural rights are is a matter of dispute among liberals. Each branch of liberalism has its own set of rights it considers to be natural; sometimes