There's two groups of people wandering around the country today who both call themselves liberals. There's people like me, who actually are liberal, who point out that while government is certainly necessary it's a necessary evil. Some things have to be done collectively and with the powers of compulsion of the State and we should assign those things to government and then get on the rest ourselves, whether individually or in voluntary collectivism as we wish.
Then there's the other kind of liberals who see government as not just necessary but something which is necessarily good and that it should, with its attendant politics, take over and run more and more of our lives. One little example of why the former view is correct, the latter a failure:
When he earmarked $100,000 in taxpayer spending to go to Jamestown's library, Rep. James E. Clyburn meant for it to go to the library in Jamestown, S.C., which is in his district. But in the bustle to write and pass the $1.1 trillion catchall spending bill, Congress ended up designating the money for Jamestown, Calif. - 2,700 miles away and a town that doesn't even have a library.
The man who actually runs the library that our geographically challenged politician intended to help originally asked for $50,000, not $100,000.
So there we have it, government and politics, twice the cost and incompetent to boot.
Yes, we need to have government and politics is a necessary handmaiden. But let's keep it where it needs to be shall we, that irreducible minimum where only government works, not sprawling across our lives like some "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money".
