What is the essential role of government.

There is no doubt that govt plays a role in economics. There must be some fairness in commerce. Collusion and greed will certainly win in any economic system without oversight. Our recent events on wall street should certainly convince us of the need for realistic rules. That and the continual denial for any need for changes.

I guess I think we can depend on the overwhelming force of greed to power us off of a cliff without significant oversight.

Those who drive the greed are not the one's that suffer. Hence there is no learning in the mistakes.

Every parasite thinks they can take just a little bit more, and they may be correct since the parasite don't kill the host, but the environment or disease that cannot be resisted... We can tell from our response to natural disasters that we are living on hope, or trusting on God or good fortune...Government should be rational people dealing with reality, trying to foresee the future enough to plan for it or at least react to it in a timely fashion... People living in the past are dead already, and will bury us if we try to be like them...

Essential?

To provide a common structure for a group of individuals.

Now, the details of how and whether or not it is effective are different questions entirely.

If that's what you're looking for, then responsibility is the word you want to use.

What the Germans, especially during the Romantic period took for granted was that language made nation, and in this, most first nations people of America would agree, because the language reflects common experience and aspirations... In this land we do not have an Alma Mater, a soul mother tying us together as a common family of mankind, a nation... What we do have, or should have is a common idea: Liberty and Justice for all, which is impossible without equality, the sharing of which makes us the equal of any natural group of people on the earth because in that idea is recognition of our common heritage with all humanity, and our equal rights to have what we together possess...

As I am sure I have stated: What Aristotle concluded was true, that governments are instituted for good because that is the aim of all human activity... The good for which our government was formed is clearly stated in the preamble of the constitution, and though the government has not pursued those goals, and in the bill of rights substituted other goals, still, those goals, listed in the preamble are good goals, and proper, and worthy of any nation that would make itself a nation on any point in common...

The common point is what makes nations, and the structure is provided by the state, and states may take infinite form, but if they do not support the nature, and needs of the people within, they defeat the people from within... Power can seem to those who hold it to be the good purpose of government, but in what they hold and with hold from the people they injure the people, and do to the people a diservice...