[tomp]

The role of the government is to solve problems that the market cannot. There's tons of market failures described in the literature (e.g. information asymmetries, principal–agent problems, or negative externalities), and others that the government can simply solve more efficiently (e.g. nationalized infrastructure prevents each private player from building their own, ultimately redundant, infrastructure, and lowers cost to entry for new players).

In my opinion, governments overreach is when governments starts to control the population's choices (e.g. prohibition or ban of illegal & experimental drugs). Government influencing the population's choices (guiding them towards "good" choices, e.g. by limiting gambling, taxing alcohol, enforcing true labels on food) can be a very good thing, [edit:] especially in situations when humans tend to behave irrationally (i.e. because our psychology / evolutionary mechanisms are hijacked).