Yet you say we should find government no more credible than Scientology?
Ironically, whenever anyone tries to defend government the first thing they mention is the roads, which are less than 1% of the budget and an even smaller percentage of personnel, and toward which the actual work is done by locally contracted private firms.
Sure, there are a lot of coordination problems that government tries (with varying degrees of success) to solve, but this doesn't put it beyond reproach. And it's certainly the case that even the US government has a fairly high degree of corruption, much of which diverts resources away from those in need toward those with political connections.
So in my view, governments derive legitimacy from their ability to solve coordination problems, adapt to changing circumstances, and stave off policies that incentivize corruption or put human rights at risk.
In the case of figurehead monarchies and the hereditary titles they grant, I think the best that could be said is that they offer nostalgia for a past era when such things mattered. In reality, vane humans strive to show status by meeting with royalty, since in spite of the monarchy's utter backwardness and absurdity, is still not something everyone gets to do, so the scarcity of the opportunity creates social value.
The reality of knighthoods past is that they were titles awarded to warlords in exchange for tributes (aka voluntary taxes) paid to a more powerful warlord (aka king) who granted privileges, land, etc., in exchange for those tributes.
This still happens today only w/o the pageantry: Imagine a US military truck with crates full of cash paying Afghan warlords for intel and mercenary troops. This is ugly business and there is no honor whatsoever in it.
Nope, doesn't qualify
A statement that, when taken in context, may actually mean something different from, or the opposite of what is written literally
Don't see how this works either.
I'll skip over Socratic irony and Dramatic irony- hopefully it is obvious this is neither.
I could be wrong, of course. The colloquial & popular use is so different from the actual meaning of the word, I am never quite sure I have the right of it.
There's no irony there, no juxtaposition, no opposite. He's trying to get across the gist of "why the hell is it always roads!?", but it's frustration, not irony.
It would be like if I claimed male authors were better than female authors, then cited George Eliot as my first example of a great male author. That would be ironic.
Roads-by-government are "a small part of the whole" - they're not contradictory in any way to the idea that services are supplied by government. They're not a counterexample. It would only be ironic (and would also fit your example) if the roads in question were actually provided by private enterprise.
What would not be ironic would be something like 'ironically, the defenders of government always mention the military as their first example - I mean come on people, have some imagination at least!' That would just be frustration.
Put simply, if there's a range of possible examples people can pick to support a given stance, and they always seem to pick one of the weakest/least-appropriate ones, then yeah, that's ironic. It's a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects.
As an aside to that, your last phrase a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects highlights a significant difference between British and American irony. In the US, you can choose to wear an ironic t-shirt. With British irony, you can't - irony is something that is unintentional (it can be known, just not intended). As soon as you intend to do it in any way, it's deliberate or expected and so becomes unironic.
In my experience the irony police are usually unwilling to consider the full subtext of someone's statement when they describe it as ironic. For instance people often say things like 'ironic, isn't it - beautiful weather all week and then when we finally decide to throw a barbecue, it rains. ' This is of course just bad luck, but people like to jokingly invoke some sense of fate conspiring against them. Or, someone might consciously wear an 'ironic t-shirt', and people consciously recognise the intent, but the unspoken subtext that maintains the irony is that there is some other observer or potential wearer who would be unaware of the incongruity.
What you're describing is a proper non-sequitur, why would a government's utility inform its credibility as an arbiter of respectability?