Governments are set up to restrain the sort of natural abuses that flow out of human nature. The American variety of it was an experiment that tossed out a ridiculously corrupt system dependent on access and birth, and replaced it with one that depended as little on government as possible. It was still corrupt from the first, because it was still human, but it was much less corrupt than all the other alternative systems to it because everyone had limited veto power over it and unlimited immunity from it in many areas.
Since then we have gone from a system that limited its own power to a system whose ideologues cry for unlimited power and spin us the wonders of universal college education and green energy that they will produce for us if only we let them do whatever the hell they want. But at least it’s not one of those horrible big corporations. Then we might actually have a choice whether to do business with it or not.
Originally published at the Sultan Knish blog.