There is no country in the world that does the "bare minimum" as you put it. And if a country did, and they were a democratic country, there is no way a government like that would be voted back into power. People around the world want more out of their government than the bare minimum, and this is shown through the functions of modern democratic governments.
In my opinion, a truly free country ensures the safety and well-being of it's citizens (well being includes caring for their health), without encroaching too much on personal freedoms. There's always a grey area, because too much personal freedom=Anarchy, and too little=Suppression. Government intervention lays somewhere in between those, and it is up to the citizens of a certain country to decide (if they are democatic) where their nation should fit. However, with this discussion we are getting more into political theory rather than just a conversation about Walmart not treating its employees properly.
This is the fatal weakness of democracy. People will vote themselves goodies, in spite of wiser voices telling them to back down. This is why AARP doesn't care what happens to the economy down the line, they want goodies now.
And democracy is in the final analysis no different than the Middle Ages, when might made right, except now the "might" is that 50%+1 of people who even vote. the other 50%-1 are in essence subjects, whose beliefs and desires aren't honored.
The U.S. Constitution was supposed to stop that by making a government which could only those things which the Constitution explicitly authorized. The great perversion began when Congress, in violation of the Constitution, began assigning legislative power to hired and appointed bodies rather than the single elected one, namely itself. The second great perversion came when states' rights were plowed under, turning the states effectively into little more than provinces. The third great perversion came with the reversal of the "commerce clause" to mean the federal government could poke its busy nose into almost anywhere, instead of its original meaning of keeping the federal government's authority in a very limited sphere.
So what we end up with is a bureaucratic oligarchy, where the true power lies with the nameless, faceless millions of "civil servants", and the few who care to vote elect "representatives" who are powerless to do little besides add to the lumbering behemoth.
Parkinson's Law takes over, and even presidents' "no hire" orders fail to halt the growth of bureaucracy. Bureaucrats beget paperwork, which begets more bureaucrats, which in turn beget more paperwork... and these days some of the paperwork is always new regulations, the function of which is at root the justification of the jobs of those same bureaucrats, who, having invented new regulations, find they need even more bureaucrats to deal with the ensuing new paperwork.
And the power of the government becomes absolute, as even now regulations so abound that it is difficult not to break one, raising the threat of punishment above every person at every time.
All this is magnified by the vile principle in the U.S. that "the ignorance of the law is no defense"... a principle which arose from a jurist's faulty translation of Latin.
Now.... shall we lift these posts and start a new thread?
