Good government: how to tell it from bad

Almost seven hundred years ago the painter Lorenzetti received an unusual commission: to paint, on the wall of the town council, how good government differs from bad — so that the rulers would look at it every day. And he depicted not thrones and battles, but something far more honest: ordinary life. Where rule is good, people calmly work, trade, and dance; where it is bad, there is fear, ruin, and emptiness.

Government is tested not by parades but by ordinary days

We are used to judging a government by its façade: by speeches, by the scale of construction, by strength on paper. But its real exam is taken elsewhere — in the kitchen of an ordinary family, in the queue for a doctor, in whether a person dreads a knock at the door. Good government is recognized not by how loudly it speaks of itself, but by whether an ordinary person can calmly work, raise children, and not fear tomorrow. Everything else is scenery.

The main sign is a protected little person

There is a simple way to tell good government from bad: look at who lives more safely in the system — the strong or the weak. Bad power protects itself from the people; good power protects the weak from the strong. Where the law is the same for all, where the official fears the citizen and not the other way around, where one can come to court without fear — there power serves the people. Where it is all the reverse, no palaces or slogans will save it: behind the handsome façade the house is quietly crumbling.

“Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.”
— John Locke

My opinion: do not let yourself be convinced that a government should be judged by its promises or its enemies. Judge by yourself and by your neighbor: has ordinary life grown easier, justice fairer, sleep calmer. Good government is not the one that loudest professes love for the people, but the one under which the people are simply not afraid. And that, perhaps, is the one exam that cannot be passed with fine speeches.

Cover: Ambrogio Lorenzetti, “Effects of Good Government” (1339).