8 CHAPTER 1|UNDERSTANDING AMERICAN POLITICS
by Congress; Congress can impeach the president; and the Supreme Court has
the power to interpret laws written by Congress to determine whether they are
constitutional.) Third, federalism divides power yet again by allotting diff erent
responsibilities to local, state, and national governments. With power divided in
this fashion, Madison reasoned, no single faction could dominate the government.Governments Promote the General Welfare
The preamble to the Constitution also states that the federal government exists
to “promote the general Welfare.” This means tackling the hard problems that
Americans cannot solve on their own, such as taking care of the poor, the sick, or
the aged, and dealing with global issues like climate change, terrorist threats, and
poverty in other countries. However, government is not inevitable—people can
decide that these problems aren’t worth solving. But if people do want to address
these large problems, government action is necessary because individuals, work-
ing by themselves, generally do not provide public goods such as these.
Often people fi nd it diffi cult to achieve shared goals because of collective action
problems. Collective action problems occur when the members of a group would
benefi t by working together to produce some outcome, but each individual is better
off refusing to cooperate and reaping benefi ts from those who do the work. Govern-
ment helps solve collective action problems. It is easy for two people or even a small
group to tackle a common problem without the help of government, but a thou-
sand people (or the more than 300 million in the United States today) would have
a very diffi cult time. They would suff er from the free rider problem: because it is
in everyone’s interest to let others pay the costs—in eff ort and resources—to tackle
the problem, and because everyone likely thinks this way, the collective goal would
never be achieved. But a government representing 300 million people can provide
public goods, such as defending the nation, that all those people acting on their own
would be unable to provide, so they elect leaders and pay taxes to ensure the provi-
sion of those goods.
Now that we understand why we have a government, the next question is, what
does the government do to “insure domestic Tranquility” and “promote the gen-
eral Welfare”? Many components of the government promote these goals, from
the police and armed services to the Internal Revenue Service, Post Offi ce, Social
Security Administration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration,
Department of Education, and Food and Drug Administration. More generally, the
government does several things:
¾ It creates and enforces laws and protects private property through the
criminal justice system.
¾ It establishes a common currency and regulates commerce among the
states and trade with other nations.
¾ It provides public goods that would not be produced or would be undersup-
plied by the free market, including national defense, an interstate highway
system, and national parks.
¾ It regulates the market to promote the general good, specifi cally by address-
ing market failures in areas such as environmental pollution and product
safety.
¾ It protects individual civil liberties, such as the freedom of speech and the
free exercise of religion.federalism The division of power
across the local, state, and national
levels of government.
public goods Services or actions
(such as protecting the environ-
ment) that, once provided to one
person, become available to every-
one. Government is typically needed
to provide public goods because
they will be underproduced by the
free market.
collective action problems Sit-
uations in which the members of
a group would benefi t by working
together to produce some outcome,
but each individual is better off
refusing to cooperate and reaping
benefi ts from those who do the work.
free rider problem The incentive
to benefi t from others’ work without
making a contribution, which leads
individuals in a collective action
situation to refuse to work together.