The responsibilities of government include the obligations to administer, adjudicate, legislate, and, by means of police and various punitive measures, to enforce the law. Government defence obligations also require it to maintain military forces; and its financial obligations require it to acquire vast sums of money. Governments may use any of these instruments, required for fulfilling their obligations, to interfere with personal freedom, for example, by over-regulation of free enterprises, by over-taxation, by censorship, by curfews, by compulsory military service, and in countless other ways that violate human rights including the right to life.
Almost every human action and transaction is excessively controlled by some government somewhere. All business transactions generate mountains of paperwork due to excessive controls; but simple things are also associated with regulations. For example, eating in a restaurant or buying a package of food is the result of compliance of the restaurateur (and his suppliers in the food production and distribution chain) with dozens of health regulations. Conditions and duration of sleep may be controlled by military codes, civil codes for some municipal workers, collective farm regulations, and in government-operated health and custodial institutions.
Endowing central governments with power is an irreversible process. Every central government of every known, practising political system has tended to take more and more power: some until the governmental shadow is omnipresent in everyone's life.
The complex circumstances of our day make it necessary for public authority to intervene more often in social, economic and cultural matters in order to bring about favourable conditions which will give more effective help to citizens and groups in their free pursuit of man's total well-being. The relations, however, between socialization and the autonomy and development of the person can be understood in different ways according to various regions and the evolution of peoples. But when the exercise of rights is restricted temporarily for the common good, freedom should be restored immediately upon change of circumstances. Moreover, it is inhuman for public authority to fall back on dictatorial systems or totalitarian methods which violate the rights of the person or social groups. (Second Vatican Council. Gaudium et Spes, 1965).