SYMBIOTIC RATHER THAN PARASITIC.

Regular readers know that riff about the proper scope of government.  Here is Cato's Meir Kohn (via Arnold Kling) elaborating on the same point.

Government is an organization created to deploy force, either to engage in predation (predatory government) or to protect a population against predation (associational government). In preindustrial Europe, the governments of kings and princes were predatory governments; think the Norman conquest of England. The governments of commercial cities were associational governments. In general, associational governments were hospitable to economic progress, while predatory governments were not.

Associational government, however, had a problem: it did not scale up very well. As the territory and population under an associational government grew, it became increasingly difficult for the population to exercise effective control over its government. This enabled the government to engage in predation: associational government turned into predatory government. Fortunately, a new form of associational government emerged, largely by chance, that solved this problem. When the provinces of the Netherlands won their war of independence from Spain, they created a national government that was an association of associational governments — a federal government.

Unfortunately, the national governments, even of federations, have this annoying habit of thinking of the associational units as operating divisions of the national government.