Free markets work when they transmit information with each transaction. When a factory owner raises his prices to cover rising costs, he's encapsulating information about everything that's happened further up the value chain. When a shopkeeper lowers the price he's willing to pay, he's encapsulating information about consumer demand and everything downstream in the value chain. If a new means of production becomes available that's more efficient than the old one, there's a profit opportunity available for the aspiring entrepreneur. And everybody has an incentive to pass on correct information, because otherwise it's their own bank account that will suffer. This appears to be the only way to organize an economy efficiently.

Free markets fail when transactions conceal information. For example, many subprime loans were made to people who had no conceivable way of paying them off, but mortgage brokers had every incentive to hide that information from the hedge funds who bought them, and didn't have to shoulder the risk of default themselves. Health-care patients have no way of knowing whether a particular procedure is medically necessary and no incentive to find out, because the insurance company pays for it. Microsoft customers had no way of knowing whether Windows is the best OS, because there were no alternatives (well, except Apple and Linux...pretend this is 1997 or so).

There's also the issue of transaction costs - it costs nearly as much money to collect tolls as it does to just build the damn highway, so the "information" that the customer sees is heavily distorted by the process of having to collect that information.

So, based on this, I can derive some general principles for the role of government:

1.) It should provide the institutional framework necessary for the market to function at all, eg. contract laws and defense.

2.) It should rectify the "lemon problem", where sellers conceal vital information from buyers or vice-versa, eg. consumer protection laws, implied warranties, truth-in-advertising laws, full disclosure on mortgages, SEC regulation, etc.

3.) It should prevent companies from leveraging a monopoly to enter a market.

4.) It should rectify externalities, where a firm takes something of value to others but doesn't pay for it, usually because it's too difficult to arrange a transaction. The classic example is pollution.

5.) It should provide goods and services where the transaction cost of attempting to measure and restrict usage is greater than the actual value of the service. Markets will never develop in these areas otherwise. A good example would be roads.

Some concrete examples, which'll probably seem kinda out-there:

To start, I wouldn't have any taxes at all. Instead, the government owns all land, and raises revenue by auctioning off leases on land, natural resources, and pollution credits. These leases would be tradable, subdividable securities, and would be subject to normal SEC prohibitions on disclosure and insider trading. If you wanted to construct a skyscraper that you expect to last 50 years, you'd buy a 50-year lease on the land. If you ended up selling it after 20, you could sell the lease on the open market, but the land itself would revert back to the government after another 30 years. The government can also buy the lease back by paying market rates.

This helps the externality problem, because every time the voters want to prevent something like a polluting factory, they have the legal ability to, but they also have a precise dollar figure for how much it'll cost, in economic terms. If people don't want oil companies to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, they can simply block the lease on drilling rights, but it will cost them a few billion dollars. Then they can decide whether the economic value to oil companies is worth more than the government services they will receive from it.

As for spending itself - roads are an obvious one, because the transaction costs of tolls are hellish. Defense is another one - I don't think we need to spend quite so much as we do, but we do need a strong military.

I would not provide free education, other than the basic literacy and civic requirements necessary for democracy to function. You tend to get what you pay for. Free education not only leads to bureacratic, uncaring schoolboards, but it also leads to freeriding, uncaring schoolchildren.

Instead, I'd create rigorous public evaluations of all schools - not necessarily tests (which generally reflect the politicians' biases more than actually useful information), but statistics about where graduates end up, satisfaction levels, evaluations from past students, etc. Then let people choose - and spend their own money - on schools. Since people shouldn't be denied education based on what their parents do, there should be loans available - but through the private sector, not public.

Also, education has a problem in that it takes years for it to pay off, and market conditions can change dramatically between when you enter and when you exit. To insure against this, I'd create a tradable derivative called "salary futures" (again through the private sector). This is not insurance on your salary (that would have a huge moral hazard problem), but rather a promise to pay the change in the difference between the average salaries of two professions. These can be bundled into funds if necessary, to diversify across the whole economy. So if you want to become an engineer but find that salaries have gone way down by the time you graduate, your salary future will kick in with the difference for X number of years, and then you can decide whether to stick with it or retrain as a lawyer.

An unwed mother has a six year old boy that is only a burden to her. She doesn't care about her son's future so she's not going to spend her hard earned money on sending him to school. He goes to the free schools for the two years it takes to learn how to read.

Plus, a doctor can't do X-Rays at your house or use his fancy gear.

(And where did you get the entire that free education means government education? There have been free schools in America since before there was a country called "America.")

Second of all, an economically free society would likely have taxes nowhere near 25%. That's higher than Hong Kong's income tax today, and much higher than America's income tax when income tax was legalized.

I've decided that the bare minimum of government that must be had are the courts (and the power to enforce their rulings). A libertarian society will be highly dependent on contracts; society could not function if you knew a powerful client could refuse to pay and ignore court rulings. I have trouble visualizing a fair, for-profit court system. If competing court systems exist, then how is the court system for a case chosen? Presumably, it would be spelled out in the contract, which gives a perpetual advantage to the vendor. Of course, the buyer could ignore the summons, but said court could force him to arrive and would then rule that it was justified doing so (as it was).

Everything that is not a court can belong to the free market, but that does not mean should. For example, you could purchase the privilege to drive on one company's network of roads, but, barring some major advances in scanning technology and some means of stopping trespassers, the need to enforce that only paid cars use the road would be extraordinarily cumbersome. The best private road system I could see would be to have a monopoly on roads in every region; road companies could then make deals with neighbors for interregional traffic and coerce developments into requiring residents to pay the road company, at the risk of having the road company block access to the development. However, I'm not sure I can trust a private monopoly more than a government monopoly.

Law enforcement is also a good candidate for government control; however, private police forces are not out of the question. There would probably be less overhead to hire police to protect an area rather than individuals, so police might not necessarily turn a blind eye to a homeless man getting mugged (not to mention that said criminal should be caught for the same reason Animal Control kills animals becoming accustomed to attacking humans). However, a system where every five feet is patrolled by a police force with different opinions of what an arrestable offense is is hardly ideal.

1) Emergency services. These are things you don't really have time to negotiate price on or do research for. Police, national defense, fire and rescue, emergency medical. These should be handled by the government because otherwise you could maximize your economic gain by taking advantage of those in duress. "Your house is burning down and your daughter is still inside. Sign here and agree to pay us $250,000 and we'll go get her."

2) Infrastructure, The government should own and operate various infrastructures and provide rules and regulations for common use. Roads are a great example of this as are the majority of airports. Another I would love to see is 'bandwidth'. Have to government own the fiber that connects my house to a central point. Then allow me to select any ISP and/or service that can be delivered over that line. Ask yourself how much cheaper and better your internet connection would be if more players than just Comcast could use your cable line, and Verison had competition on its dsl service.

The reason I believe governments should look after these types of services is that they can afford to make the capital heavy investments needed to provide it, as well as provide a neutral platform for capitalist enterprises to compete over and provide greater value. I also tend to put education here.

Since I'm not a USian, I don't know what to make of your arguments about congress and the like, but it worked out fine here in the past.

There also need to be some regulation of how individuals use 'commons' like air, water, electromagnetic and sonic spectra etc., as well as land use rules, to avoid one person land locking others, parking their mile long yacht alongside Golden Gate Bridge, blocking bay entry, and such.

Some minimum levels of diplomacy, aimed at providing Americans, both individuals and organizations, 'fair and reasonable' treatment abroad would be nice, as well, especially if backed by military muscle.