The more people expect from government, the more biased they become against limiting government power.

Once freedom is equated with a certain material standard of living, confiscation becomes the path to liberation.

The only things government can do are regulate and redistribute, prohibit and penalize, confiscate and command. Are these the things that liberty is made of? Somebody else's money and an endless list of Thou Shalt Nots?

Gun laws are an attempt to nationalize the right of self-defense. Politicians perennially react to the police's abject failure to prevent crime by trying to disarm law-abiding citizens. The worse government fails to control crime, the more the politicians want to restrict individuals' rights to defend themselves. But police protection in most places is typical government work - slow, inefficient, and unreliable.

Entire generations of Americans have come of age since the ancient time when the president's power was constrained by a duty of candor to the American people.

It is important to recognize and politics positive thinking is often the slaves' virtue - something that people do to con themselves about the burden and change being placed upon them.

To blindly trust government is to automatically vest it with excessive power. To distrust government is simply to trust humanity - to trust in the ability of average people to peacefully, productively coexist without some official policing their every move. The State is merely another human institution - less creative than Microsoft, less reliable than Federal Express, less responsible than the average farmer husbanding his land, and less prudent than the average citizen spending his own paycheck.