The Stack: The Real Purpose of Government and Why It Matters
What is government actually supposed to do? That’s the question too few people are asking—and the consequences are everywhere. In this episode, Todd Huff continues his framework series by breaking down the true role of government through the lens of truth, human nature, incentives, and power.
The Founders understood a critical balance: government must be strong enough to maintain law and order, but limited enough to preserve liberty. Its role is not to control outcomes, redistribute wealth, or engineer equality—it is to protect rights, enforce contracts, and create a stable environment where freedom can flourish.
Instead, modern politics has shifted toward emotional appeals and promises of government-managed solutions. The result? More control, less freedom, and a dangerous misunderstanding of what government can actually achieve.
If we don’t return to these foundational principles, we risk trading liberty for false promises. This episode challenges listeners to rethink everything they’ve been told about government—and to start asking better questions.
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📝 Transcript: The Real Purpose of Government and Why It Matters
The Todd Huff Show – March 18 , 2026
Host: Todd Huff
Todd Huff: Yes, my friends, we are on day. It's hard to believe this day six now of our special series. That's just giving folks a framework for how to discuss politics. And again, not to repeat myself, but we have people tuning in at different times. Everyone is not able to get every program, which we'll let it slide on here, my friends. But if you miss something, you can always go to the website. I'd say the best thing to do is to sign up for the Inner Circle. It's totally free. You'll get all the information emailed to you, including some deeper dives, some additional content that we don't have time to get to on the program. All you got to do is text the word truth to 317-785-1030, 317-785-1030. So we're just going through this, my friends, to give folks a framework, to give people the opportunity when you have conversations, or not even that, sometimes just to think about things clearly. We've laid a lot of the foundation for how we've gotten to this, well, to this point. We've talked about truth, the nature of truth, what truth is. We've talked about human nature. We've talked about power. We've talked about incentives, and all this is building to give us, again, a framework, a prism through which we can view the politics, the political issues of the day.
Todd Huff: And that's what we're doing, and I appreciate you joining us, my friends, as we take this very important journey together. More folks need to know these principles. We used to teach these things, or versions of these things, in this country, and now we don't. Now we teach that America is a terrible place, that capitalism is evil, and that sort of stuff. My friends, we don't want to let that continue to fester and grow. That will metastasize, and that will be dangerous and even deadly to the host nation here, the that adopts that way of thinking. So that's where we're headed today, I guess I should say. We're going to talk about the purpose of government, and I'm going to, again, lay the foundation here, get us caught up, and full speed ahead we go today.
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Todd Huff: And as you begin to think about these things, and as you begin to think, okay, I understand the objective nature of truth. Truth is what is, and we need to recognize that, and part of recognizing that means that we understand and accept our human nature. Our human nature is one that has incredible potential. We're made in the very image of God himself, and God is absolutely amazing, and we have just a little bit of that in us, our creative natures, our ability to work and focus on tasks to love and raise families. I mean, there's a lot of that that's out there. A lot of good, but we're also fallen, and this is where I would encourage you if you haven't already, to study the Scriptures because that gives you a glimpse into the true depravity of humanity. And once you understand and accept that, you also begin to understand that humanity responds to incentives. Since we're not idiots, although a lot of people have seemed to have given away their ability to think, their responsibility to think, the truth is, is that humanity is smart enough when there are rules that are designed a certain way.
Todd Huff: We find a way to minimize the impact of those rules on us. And that's not even all bad. That's just smart, right? That's intelligent. It's the reason why people have accountants to lower their tax obligations and liabilities and so forth. And it's the reason why, you know, people just respond. We talked about some of these things differently. So now once we kind of understand those things, and again, if you want more information on those things, we've covered those the past five days now, the past five days, this is day six, you can just go back and look or listen. So now the next question is, what is government actually supposed to do? I may even wanna take this a half a step further backwards, my friends, I might wanna start by saying, why is government even required? Now, that may seem like a radical question, but some people have it. And listen, there's nothing wrong with asking questions, right? The side that doesn't want debate are the ones who want to silence questions. They're the ones that penalized you in 2020, or shortly thereafter in 2021, if you had questions about the 2020 election results.
Todd Huff: These were the same folks who came screaming at you in 2020 also, when you simply asked questions about COVID policies. When you ask questions like I did on this program, why if a virus is smaller than the holes in the cloth masks, why are we, or really any material, why do we think that's gonna prevent us? I understand spittle and that sort of stuff, but a lot of people thought that they were immune to getting the virus and so forth. It just doesn't, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't add up, but they don't want questions. See, questions are a good thing, especially if you're pursuing truth. If you're pursuing truth, sometimes we have to ask questions that may even sound offensive to certain people, but it's how we get to truth. That's why no question offends me and it won't. Of course, there are people who ask questions to try to make a point through the asking of questions. That's a little bit of a different scenario, but if you're truly pursuing the truth, you're going to ask difficult questions.
Todd Huff: And so you can ask, why do we need government? Well, my friends, we've talked about human nature. We've talked about the condition of the human heart. We've got history to basically support what we've talked about, or more importantly, what the Bible says about human nature. It's not good. There's been a lot of bad things that have happened on planet earth at the hands of people. And so the truth is, is that people need to have some degree of law and order. You don't want there to be complete and utter chaos and anarchy. You don't want the rules of the game to be, what do they say? Might makes right, right? Just to get the biggest, strongest, meanest, baddest people around to go around and basically take whatever they want, pillage towns and abuse people and take property and all that sort of stuff. You have to have some semblance of law and order. That is a good thing. And when God envisioned, if that's even how God behaves, but when God had a vision for Earth, of course, He knew what was going to happen. He wants there to be order. He doesn't want there to be complete chaos and tumult and so forth. And so law and order is a good thing. But we also know by talking about the nature of humanity and the history of government, we also know that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Todd Huff: And so we know that at the other end of that spectrum, that continuum, you've got a heavy-handed government that controls everything that we do. And that's not good either, because that's abused. That's used to beat people down. That's used to oppress. That's used to do a lot of bad things. And we've seen that happen a lot over the course of history, including a lot in the 20th century when, well, communism was rampant. Big government was rampant. You had the Soviet Union and so forth. Anyway, so the Founders understood that we want law and order, but we want to have the—how do I frame this correctly? You want to have the biggest government, excuse me, the smallest government that can create the correct balance of law and order and liberty. And that's what they sought to do. In fact, if you know the history of this country, you know that there were a couple. There were two attempts. The first attempt came when the Founders framed the Articles of Confederation, and they realized that they did not give the federal government enough centralized power to really handle some of the problems that they had to deal with. And so along came the Constitutional Convention, and they gave the government a little bit more federal power.
Todd Huff: So that's how we got, I guess you could say, version 2.0, the Constitution. But again, the smallest government possible to give you the law and the order and the safety and the protection that you need. Now, the government can't protect us from everything, but it certainly has a responsibility to protect us against foreign enemies, to say the least, and to provide some structure, law and order, to make sure that people are not simply having their rights trampled upon. Having their property taken, those sorts of things. And so along comes the government. And so that's the space the government is supposed to fill. Now, I would say modern politics rarely even asks that question. What is the government actually supposed to do? They don't even ask the question. They just, again, as we've talked about over the past several days, they give a bunch of feelings and emotions and say, wouldn't it be nice if we could eliminate this problem from the earth and let's have the government do it. And the government obliges because that, of course, gets people's votes. That gets politicians more power, more notoriety, more opportunity to be able to stand up there and pontificate about all the great things that they could do. If only you would just elect them. If only you would give them a little bit more of your tax dollars. If only you would allow them to take a little bit more from the wealthiest Americans.
Todd Huff: If only you give up a little bit more of your freedom and you trade it for their protection, you will finally be safe and utopia will be reached. That, my friend, is a lie straight from the pits of hell. It is unattainable and unachievable, yet because, and I, you know, a lot of this may stem from the fact that we were created to live in that state of perfect harmony, not because of a government that exists. But because of our initial relationship in the garden with God. And we yearn for that. I think we yearn for a return. No, we yearn for a return to that. And that's what God has said in motion to eventually restore that. He will make all things new. It just takes some time, especially from our perspective, our earthly perspective. And I think that that's maybe a reason why there's a natural longing for this. But yet the only one who can achieve that is God, not a bunch of people who say, hey, I'm from the government and I'm here to help. That is not the way to get there. And so instead of debate that talks about the role of government, what it's actually even supposed to be doing, what it actually can achieve and attain and so forth, we debate about who gets what.
Todd Huff: That's a big thing, right? You're going to vote for Democrats and you're basically voting for Robin Hood. You're voting for someone to take from the rich and give to the poor. And that's considered a noble thing to do. If you don't talk about the fundamental purpose of government and some of these deeper ideas, you end up arguing about who pays for what, what benefits we're getting and who pays for it. It's usually somebody else, right? If it wasn't that someone else should pay for it, we wouldn't even have a need to think that we should use government like this because we would pay for ourselves. But we come up with these ideas that someone else owes us something for reasons no one can actually explain. But they try to, they try to blame people and say the reason that the wealthy owes you this is because they've built their empires upon you and so forth and all these stories, all these narratives that get attention.
Todd Huff: And left to circles, but for the responsible, for the people who want to take control of their own lives, they don't fall prey to this sort of nonsense. They also debate which group deserves help. This is where the power of identity politics gets really, gets its, increases its power, I guess, because you start dividing people based upon superficialities or socioeconomic status. And you can quickly begin to see how this becomes a very energized debate. You got, you know, poor, a poor race of this group of people and a wealthy group of that race of people and it's just, you can harp against the one and blame them for the difficulties and challenges of the other group and the other group likes to believe that because whatever the group is, you notice I'm not even using, I'm not using race here because it doesn't matter what the race is.
Todd Huff: This is how politicians manipulate us. This is how they control the narrative and actually keep us from even asking some of these, some of these more poignant and important questions. Politics becomes more of a competition over resources and they convince us a lot of times that the pie, the amount of goodies that exist in the world is a fixed amount. They don't take into account that capitalism actually grows the pie and of course if they do take it into account, they tell you how disproportionate it is but what they don't tell you is how much bigger of a chunk we all get living in this prosperous nation than the vast, vast, vast amount of humanity, numbers of people who've lived before us. And so this is what it becomes and government was not created. Hear me say this, if you didn't hear me say any of those other words which you missed out, if you didn't, but hear me say this, government was not created to manage everyone's outcomes. Government was not created to get back at some mythical boogeyman that people erect as the individual or the group who is responsible for their particular difficulties.
Todd Huff: That doesn't mean that there's not times when people directly infringe upon your rights and property and those sorts of things, that's why we actually have a government to have that law and order to create a system of justice so that people are not taken advantage of and not abused and so forth but beyond that, just living our lives, the government is not created, was not created, has never intended to have a role in managing outcomes for people. And that's what it's become today and it is a dangerous thing, my friends, a truly, truly dangerous thing. So little pause here I'm a little hot in the studio today you know it was cold yesterday was cold I turned up the heat I don't like to do that especially when it's been in the 70s turned up the heat now I got it too hot in here I'm just not feeling it today I am as far as what I'm talking about but just stuffy and I don't like it. So gotta take a pause though quick pause here friends if you're living with discomfort if you're tired of living off prescriptions and managing the side effects you're not alone a lot of folks are looking for something natural they can trust that's why I want you to check out Christopher's organic botanicals it's a family-run Kratum company and it's rooted in truth tradition and transparency.
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Todd Huff: They are supposed to protect citizens from, or it is, I should say, supposed to protect citizens from foreign threats, establish law and order, protect individual rights. Notice what I didn't say there. I didn't say establish them. I didn't say create them. I said protect them. Enforce contracts, right? That's another thing that I think we all know. We don't think about it that way, but if two people reach an agreement, this is what the court system is for. And one side doesn't fulfill the contract, or there's the dispute about what it actually means when it comes to some particular set of circumstances, the government is tasked with fixing that or resolving that difference of opinion. And then just provide a stable framework for society. Now, if you look, a lot of these, well, a lot of these things our government is not doing. These are the fundamentals, by the way. When we had open borders, was the government protecting its citizens from foreign threats? When we had cities burning to the ground, was our government establishing law and order? When we had the government colluding with social media companies and big tech to get information or to try to silence the speech of certain individuals on some of these social media sites, is that the government protecting your right to free speech and your— I mean, yes, in a large part, in large part, we have historically done these things.
Todd Huff: But if you look at how some of these states have been run or how the federal government has been run by the extreme lunatic radicals over the course of the past, I don't know, we'll say 50 years, 50 to 100 years, even that's not always been the case. It's not always been evident. But government creates the conditions or helps create the conditions for freedom to actually thrive and grow. And when it doesn't do it, when it doesn't do that basic task, your freedoms begin to suffer. And sometimes, sometimes we don't connect the two or people abdication of its responsibilities, we don't necessarily or some people don't necessarily see that as a direct infringement upon their their liberty, but that's what effectively happens. That's what government supposed to be doing. Instead, the left wants it to be used to interfere or manipulate the outcomes of people's lives. Even if an even if they aren't capable of doing those things and they're not to be able to tell a constituency or a base that you can do that. I mean, it's, it's appealing to some people. It really is. It sounds so good. It sounds like, you know, to people who don't want to take responsibility or who don't know any better.
Todd Huff: Who've been lied to, who've been told that someone else is the cause of their problems and so forth. And listen, sometimes people can contribute to our problems. Sometimes our problems just happen, right? There are things that just happen. Sometimes it's our fault. We need to go look in the mirror and say, this is the role I played in this. That's not the case every time. Certainly that's not the case. I mean, it wasn't the case for the, if you, if you're familiar with the book of Job in the Bible, which is the, the oldest book, it's believed, well, when you look at the, well, it's very old. Well, we'll just say that I don't want to get into that whole discussion, but when you look at, when you look at life, it's easy to blame other people. We don't like accountability. Again, that goes to our human nature. It's easier to blame someone else. Government's job is to protect the playing field, not decide the score. You know, I have, I've been around sports my whole life. I started playing football in second grade. In fact, my brother for Christmas had gotten my dad, this is pretty cool, I can't tell you the name of the company cause I don't know because he got it, I did not.
Todd Huff: But whoever it is, you can send them old VHS tapes and they can digitize it and they create an app or whatever. They've created an app where you log in and you can watch on your phone. Digitize, I'm trying to say this the right way, digitize the VHS tapes. And when I was a kid, my grandpa, my mom's dad, he was, he was like a dad. My dad was my, like a dad too. I had a wonderful, I had wonderful people that had been involved in raising me, but my grandpa was a young grandfather. I don't know. He was in his around 40, early forties, maybe grandfather. And so he was highly involved going to all of our games, recording a lot of our sporting events and played football since second grade. I think you could play basketball when I was a kid in third grade. And I played all the way as long as I could. I played basketball through high school. I played football through college. I always just love sports. I did. Some people don't like it. That's fine, but I did. Ran track a little bit, played baseball when I was younger. Baseball had a good friend who's a huge baseball fan. Baseball to me as a kid, I've actually grown to like it more.
Todd Huff: I think as an adult, I'm still not like a hardcore fan, but I enjoy watching good baseball, especially in person. It's kind of hard on TV sometimes, but man, you go to the ballpark. It's really nice and the weather's great. It's just a nice experience. But baseball was not enough action for me back in the day. Anyway, what matters here is to say after I graduated and got older, I coached. I've coached football, I've helped with football a little bit. I've coached basketball a fair amount. I've coached soccer a fair amount, which I never thought I'd say. And I've reffed, I've reffed in, I haven't reffed football, but I have reffed in basketball. And so when I say that line, government's job is to protect the playing field, not decide the score. That's kind of the role of an official, right? You're supposed to make sure that kids follow the rules out there on the basketball court. I had to interject myself in a couple of near fights in the league. I officiated a couple of times. I don't know that it would have gone to blows, but it got really intense. And a couple of guys went after the other person and shoving, and I separated them.
Todd Huff: And that sort of stuff. So you're to protect the playing field, the court, whatever, not decide the score. That's the job of the government, my friends. It's not supposed to manage everyone's life. It's not supposed to somehow engineer a quality of outcomes. I don't even know what that means. I remember, I do remember talking about this on the show. I mean, first of all, how in the world do you do this? What do people think government can do? The amount of magic that people think the federal government has is mind boggling to me, but nonetheless, people still believe this. And I remember during the presidential debate, this must have been, this must've been in 20 had to be in 2020. Yeah, it was 2020 because they didn't know I was 2020, 2016. It was four old white guys in a Clinton, including sexy, sexy, sexy Martin O'Malley. 2020 actually that was 2016. 2020 was a big field and the power brokers in the Democrat party after the South Carolina primary all got together and tried to force everyone out and basically coalesce around president bribery.
Todd Huff: They thought he had the best chance of winning, but I remember when they were debating and I remember looking at some of the numbers cause it was a big field. I remember seeing this guy had seven minutes of talking, this guy had 17. And I remember coming on this program even and saying, how does a Democrat party who can't even guarantee equal amounts of time. On a 10 or 50, whatever many candidates they had, how can they possibly guarantee equality of outcomes for people? How can they ensure that everyone gets paid what they're worth and all this kind of stuff? It's just crazy talk, my friends. It's not the purpose of government. They can't even manage the Democrat party or any political party. They can't even guarantee equal talking time during a debate. So time out here for me, my friends, you're listening to conservative not bitter talk. I'm your host Todd Huff back in just a minute. Welcome back, my friends. I hope you've enjoyed. I love this. I love talking about the things that are happening every day, too.
Todd Huff: Don't misunderstand me, but I really have a huge interest in talking about these bigger principles. It is such something that's just lacking in our society and our culture today. By the way, just anything that requires any degree of depth is overshadowed a lot of times. We're so used to sound bites. We're so used to one-liners. We're so used to watching people who are an inch deep and a mile wide. They tell us they know everything about everything as they run for office, but yet they can't even go beneath the surface. I had a friend tell me he was at an event and there were people there speaking or part of a panel and some people that you might know. They're in the conservative space, and I'm not going to name names. I'm just going to share a story. It's people who are just say relatively well known or at least somewhat known. And they were asked a softball question about something in politics. I don't remember the specific answer or the specific question, but he said that they just totally whiffed on the question. And it's just interesting because it's people who you would see or hear talking a lot, and yet you ask a question that has any amount of thinking required or depth, and some people swing and miss because that's just not what's out there. And I know that's not what a lot of people want, but I think if you talk about it in a way to put it into modern terms.
Todd Huff: And just have an interest in these things, I think people want to hear it. Maybe I'm maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. But anyway, we should be able to give an answer, an explanation, a thoughtful response to some of the things that are out there today. I'm telling you that we have reasons to believe the things that we do. What's the I heard Norman Geisler and I want to confuse Christianity with politics, so I'm going to be careful here, but just Norman Geisler, a Christian apologist, I read used to read his books a lot and he had written somewhere, maybe multiple times, he had written they have good questions talking about the skeptics and the doubters we have good answers. I don't have all the answers, but we have good answers to some of the questions. Why aren't we sharing it? And that's the same way I feel about some of these important concepts. Why aren't we explaining this and shouting this from the rooftop talking about the role of government here today. Friends, let me ask you a question. Would you rather take two salty soft gels a day or spend hours in your doctor's office talking about your high cholesterol? I know what I'd choose and I like my doctor. It's a good friend of mine, actually. But Salty is an all natural clinically proven dietary supplement that lowers cholesterol.
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Todd Huff: All right, so we talked about what government's supposed to do. We touched on what government's not supposed to do. It is not supposed to manage lives. It is not supposed to engineer some sort of way that we're all getting any quality of outcomes. How is that even measured? How is that even remotely possible? How do we know when we get there, even if we can do those sorts of things? Government's not designed to redistribute wealth between certain groups of people. How would they determine that? Why would they determine that? Why do they think that they should insert themselves? I remember Walter Williams, he used to fill in for the late great Rush Limbaugh. Walter Williams also, well, he would talk about economics. He was an economics professor somewhere in the, I want to say in Virginia, somewhere at a college, but just a brilliant man.
Todd Huff: And he used to ask the question, why do we think? He said, you wouldn't think of walking up to some guy on the street, putting your hand in his back pocket and taking money out of his wallet. But why do we think that we can elect politicians who do that very thing? Why do we think by having an instant, one degree of separation, I'm not going to go do it, take it out of your pocket, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to elect somebody who's going to take the money out of your pocket and put it in mine. Why do we think that that's a moral thing to do? And at some point, as he pointed out, taxation is theft. Government does not exist to solve every problem. It never can do that. If we give government the authority to do that, if we assume government has the power and the ability, we're giving them way too much power to do that. And that's a frightening place to be as a country. Government should not be in the business of doing things like guaranteeing income or housing, educational outcomes, healthcare outcomes. It's not possible to do these things.
Todd Huff: They certainly should be working to create a society where people have options, where there's competition in the marketplace so that these things are as affordable as possible, but without trying to guarantee them. The minute government tries to guarantee something, that's when it becomes an entitlement. It becomes less available to the public. It becomes harder to get. It becomes regulated. It becomes more expensive, whatever. It never works the way they tell us. The more government tries to control, the less freedom that we have. That's the trade-off, my friends. We talked about trade-offs yesterday, but that's the trade-off. I've got to run out of time here. Thanks for listening. SDG.
