DHodges wrote:It's not that they really want to limit the government; they want to harness its power to their own ends.
We need to ask what government is, and what it is for.
In my opinion...
Really, we are all just a bunch of people plunked on this planet, trying to figure out how best to get by in our lives. We have these funky things called "history" and "tradition" that mess with our minds a bit. Some want to hold on to these things, figuring that they've worked well enough to get us here, so they work - but others feel they don't work, or at least not well enough.
Look at the rest of the creatures on this planet. None of them seem to have a discernible government, although a lot of them seem to have a hierarchy. Humans did that too, as far as I can tell, in the early days. He who could beat up the most other people got to be king. Of course it didn't stay just like that, especially as his group got bigger. He needed other people who could beat the masses into submission, so he had to pay/bribe/coerce some others into helping him. Make them feel special or indebted and gain their loyalty. Then, in humanitarian countries, the special or indebted meme grew to all the people and suddenly it got called nationalism. In fierce dictatorships, the punishments got harsher and the control got stricter.
Of course along the way some groups rebelled and made their own nations. A fairly recent example of this rebellion was in colonial America. There are probably some tribes that did the same sort of thing, but nothing on the scale of the USA. Anyway, the founders figured that in order to protect ourselves from these other nations, we had to have some kind of centralized organization kind of like the other countries, but better. They had history and tradition haunting them too, so they couldn't get past the basic fact that "kind of like" would mean the seeds of being basically the same.
Although a figurehead is switched out every 4-8 years, a lot of people wiggled their way into being essentially American royalty. Meanwhile some of the more established and overt royalties were being outgrown by their countries, and were making personal cutbacks in how lavish their lifestyles and scrambling to make themselves look useful because their people just wouldn't put up with it anymore. Now, Americans are looking at our covert royalty and asking why we should support their lavish lifestyles when they don't seem to be doing anything, just like people of some other countries did with their royalty. In the humanitarian countries, the perks for belonging to one nation or another picked up. Government became more of a provider than a dictator.
It seems that when people question their government, one of two things happens: either the government says "you're right, let's make this better for everyone" or it says "shut up or eat lead." Americans are starting to question our government. We're right to be concerned if the outcome is more like North Vietnam, or more like France.
Hodges, the adage "you can't please all the people all the time" is true. Maybe there is a better way to deal with life than through government, or maybe government is a beast that can be tamed with the right kind of populace. Maybe it's both, but we first have to learn to control the beast before we can vanquish it... like a social evolutionary step.
We have a lot of choices on how we, as a human race, can live our lives - but most people can't see them. I can't even begin to touch on all the options in one post, and even if I could - there would not likely be one that fit everyone perfectly. At least not at this stage of evolution.
Maybe we can't all agree on being
for the same thing, but I think that an overwhelming majority agreeing "not that" is a step in the right direction.