Proper government

The anti-concept of “proper government” or “proper state” is a triple fallacy used by Rand and the randroids in order to hide their obvious lack of a theory of the state -- a theory explaining what a state is, how it appears historically, and above all else, what determines its territory.

The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.

Ayn Rand, [1]

A properly functioning government, one whose purpose is to protect individual rights against attack

Peter Schwartz, “Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty” in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, 1988.

Triple fallacy:

1. barking cat fallacy: to want a government, but respecting individual rights (which matches neither the common definition of what a State is, nor any extant or historical state);
2. No true Scotsman fallacy: claim that any other government is not a true government [2][3] (combined with the previous fallacy: claim that any non-barking cat is not a true cat);
3. reverse straw man fallacy: hitherto proceed to treat real, existing governments (such as the U.S. one) as if they matched that definition, whereas they don't and can't (in other words: ask for a barking-cat, pretend that any non-barking-cat is not a cat, but then accept an actual cat and act is if it were indeed barking)

But by what magic does one expect a violent monopoly to all of a sudden do the opposite of what constitutes its founding principle, the condition of its survival, and the interest of its agents?

François-René Rideau, Bastiat était-il libéral? Anarchisme et minarchisme

if you wish to know how libertarians regard the State and any of its acts, simply think of the State as a criminal band, and all of the libertarian attitudes will logically fall into place

Murray Rothbard

But a government that initiates the employment of force against men who had forced no one, the employment of armed compulsion against disarmed victims, is a nightmare infernal machine designed to annihilate morality: such a government reverses its only moral purpose and switches from the role of protector to the role of man’s deadliest enemy, from the role of policeman to the role of a criminal vested with the right to the wielding of violence against victims deprived of the right of self-defense.

Ayn Rand [4]