You can go ahead and run your numbers on religious governments. Make sure you take the length of time that they were in charge into account, as well as the number of activities (such as autopsies and moneylending) that they forbad for religious reasons, to the detriment of their people, rather than merely counting up those murdered by Stalin and Hitler and Pol Pot and Peron. I shudder to think what the Crusaders could have done with automatic weapons. Scale is a function not only of the will to destroy but of the tools available and the number of targets at hand.

Bill Gates (and I use his name symbolically) has a flock of lawyers that can take you to the cleaners if he wants. By the time you get finished establishing your innocence, you're already in the hole paying for your defense. He also has the ability to corner the market in several areas, thus forcing you to either do without or finance his ability to hire lawyers. (In defense of lawyers, I will only say that we either have courtrooms or shootouts. I favor the former as a method of conflict resolution.) So, yeah, he really does have a gun, but he hires someone else to use it.

Wealthy people have used their wealth for good things, but it doesn't mean that the same wealthy person is immune from using wealth to crush others. To pretend that wealth confers virtue is just as silly as to pretend that poverty does.

The donors who have given to my library are people who give an average of $100/year. The state also contributes. Yeah, we have plaques on the wall for people and companies who gave $500 and up to the capital campaign. There aren't that many. I can visualize the plaques. There are about 25. Without our small donors, we would have a smaller building, but more to the point, it would be empty. Big money likes big, splashy philanthropy. Smaller donors are more consistent.

If you want to defend Andrew Carnegie, who was a generous builder of buildings in his later years, having made his fortune by treating his employees like something you'd scrape off your shoe, that's fine. I can appreciate rehabilitation of one's reputation when I see it. Read a couple of biographies of the man and you'll see what I mean.

You just hate government. You hate the idea that someone can force someone else to do anything, be it hook up to the sewer, license a dog, send someone to the Moon, or pay for a war. Your characterization of politicians as Mrs. Grundys and Hitlers-in-training betrays your inherent distrust of anyone who enters public service. People are more complex in their motives than that, but complexity doesn't lend itself well to stereotyping.

I don't hate government. I don't hate big business, either. I find both of them to be powerful, in different ways, and therefore worthy of my suspicion. As a Little Person, I understand that my ability to affect the actions of either one depends upon my willingness to give up a lot of my personal time to organize other Little People and become a pest to them. Product boycotts, class action suits, political action: it's all bees vs. the bear. The species of bear doesn't matter.