that the very power inherent in government is going to encourage people to seek it out, build it up so they can make deals with it and use it for their own benefit?

You say there should be no government, or as little as possible, but as long as it is a source of profit there will be an incentive for power centers to co-opt it. Businesses will seek to form alliances with government and work to serve it, because it gives them a free and easy work-around to frustrate the checks and balances of the free market.

Perhaps the growth of government you lament has been a result of the growth and perfection of capitalism, not the other way around. When I look at what has obviously gone wrong with our government, I don't see a giant bureaucracy crushing big business, what I see is big business and government working together to overwhelm local government, small businesses, and the private citizen.

In many ways, the program of Libertarianism has one thing in common with that of Marxism. It is very insightful at finding out what's wrong, but totally incapable of coming up with solutions. And the very centers of power that have the resources to actually challenge big government are precisely the ones that profit excessively from it. If you dig deep enough into any crooked or bloated buraucratic state operation, you will always find entire industries feeding parasitically on it. They have no incentive to change anything, and they will fight like demons to prevent change. This is why when Republicans do take power, nothing really changes.

The right thing to do with the ring was to throw it into the volcano, but it was those who sought power that forged it and gave it life in the first place. This is why I think the Libertarian program will fail, TB. It just wouldn't be profitable to implement it.