It's one thing to criticize government waste, another thing to rail against the idea of "big government" without defining what is meant by big. The current hysteria around "big government" smacks of elitist paranoia about the inherent power of the People ...in a democracy. It's inconsistent and odd to say it's good for the government to regulate our sexuality and reproduction, but it should stay out of the financial system. The hysteria vilifies the most powerful instrument of the People's will in a democracy, our government. And it lets off the hook the criminals on Wall Street and turns the People against themselves. Isn't it at least a bit obnoxious to assert that liberty should be defined simply as the absence of government and insist that this must be so or you're a _____? Are you really free when you're starving to death because the government is not in the room? Let's think about it. Let's talk about it with civility and reason. There's a lot to discuss. Note to all the liberty dogmatists out there: There is no one absolute definition liberty. "What is liberty ?" is one of the enduring questions in the humanities along with "What is love?" "What is justice?" "What is evil?" and "What is human nature?" This is part of the ongoing conversation that is the stuff of human history. The desire to answer or at least assert a particular answer to these questions propels events in our history. To settle on one definition as absolute would actually lead to authoritarian thinking. Ongoing dialogue about these human values is a good thing. To be more specific, political theorists such as Isaiah Berlin analyzed at least two - different and at times competing - concepts of liberty in western political theory. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/ Negative ("freedom from") articulated by Hobbes among others and positive ("freedom to") articulated by Aristotle among others. There are other competing definitions of liberty. And, yes, we are a democracy AND a republic. http://www.coffeepartyusa.com/democracy-and-republic See More
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