I agree that the fact that we still have considerable political freedom, light-years ahead of most nations, is something to be grateful for.

However, since it doesn't actually COST the government anything NOT to oppress us, I'm not sure that this translates into being grateful for a confiscatory tax system.

You are also right that the line at the trough stretches to the horizon, and there are damn few people who are not getting some kind of taxpayer money through some channel or other. Me for one, living off of NASA and DARPA contract work.

Some of this is direct welfare, to either corporations, who usually don't need it, or to the poor and elderly, many of which do (particularly now that government largesse has squeezed out private alternatives). A whole heck of a lot more is to people who are simply doing various jobs for the government, like me, the guy at the Post Office, the Marine in Afghanistan, and legions of others.

Could a lot of these jobs be done privately? Sure. I think it's a goal to work towards, but we can't just cut this stuff off cold.

I wish there was some incentive in the government to try and cut the fat without hitting the bone. Right now it's an awful lot of fat.

I keep repeating that we are spending twice what we were in 1974. In 1974 we had pretty much the same services, population, and needs that we have now, and no one was starving in the streets. It is almost impossible not to conclude that much of the government growth since then can't really be absolutely necessary.

The cost is not irrelevant. We can't "work within the system" if this keeps going on indefinitely. Radical increases in government control of economics, usually in past history by imposing Marxist systems, has ALWAYS been followed by the destruction of civil liberties and individual rights. Philosophers and writers like Hayek and others have shown why this is not an aberration of socialism, but an inevitable progression.

We can't keep growing our government forever--I know what lies on the far end of that curve.

It is strange that liberals are so constantly terrified of American conservatives forcing some weird religious dictatorship on them while they ignore the lessons of history and the record of the Left in this century.