is that elitists are those who you disagree with. Well, I'm not going to try arguing with that logic.

And then you use a quote by Thoreau, that great favorite of the hippy-dippy 60s, to back it up! Can't you see the parallels with the Mexican War with our current conflict? No, the wars are not the same, but the justifications for them always sound the same.

"Government is best which governs least" may very well be a true statement, but it is the proposition you are trying to prove, not evidence of anything. And of course, there is nothing in that statement liberals, or I, as a liberal, disagree with, so it is obviously a bad example to use to broad-brush us with. It is applied as an attempt to put words in our mouths, or ascribe to us motives we don't have, in order to discredit our entire agenda.

Contrary to conservative propaganda, liberals have no problem with the idea that government should be minimized, they just feel that the purpose of government is to prevent the abuse of non-governmental power, such as that exercised by tyrants, criminals, natural disasters, foreign enemies, and the business community. There is nothing wrong with the idea that government should be limited, but that does not mean it should be emasculated, especially when that hobbling is designed primarily to allow one faction or class to exercise power over the rest of the commonwealth.

No one is denying that government can be abused, or that honest differences can arise in how a community chooses to implement its admittedly coercive power. But when a political philosophy intimately associated with a powerful economic constituency dismisses all regulation and supervision as simply the work of the devil, my personal alarms all go off at once.