Government is not the solution--it is the problem (NOT).

Reasonable people were outraged at the time it occurred, and we still are: Ronald Reagan's pronouncement that Government was causative in (virtually all of) our problems, and that they are addressed by diminution of its size, scope, and power.  Donald Trump, our new <gritted teeth> president, seems to be saying much the same thing; this canard is now one of the assumptions--stipulations--in public discourse about our way of life.

This is outrageous, as is the practice of electing to government service persons who believe that government cannot serve.  Why would people who hold that belief stand for election or appointment to such jobs?  Why would we trust them in those positions?

My usual assumption is that where motivations are not apparent, then there exists something that I am (we are?) are missing or misunderstanding about what we have been told--but equally or more likely may be that we are being lied to.  This time my suspicion is that they hold to no such principle in general; they just don't like constraints on the actions of members of their class.  Constraining the actions of the powerful is a good bit of why we have a civil government--an _elected_ government--in place of a monarch or some other form of tyrant.

Another possibility--one that many others have advanced as fairly adequately covering the facts--is that they take those jobs as part of a campaign to finish it off: to advance (complete?) the destruction of democratic government by further undermining our confidence in its competence.

Michael Moore has seemed to me a bit shrill, a bit outrageous, a bit hyperbolic, rather graceless--but lately I have been listening to him somewhat more attentively.  I have had a look at his Web site <http://michaelmoore.com>, which contains a link to this old-but-not-stale posting from 2012 on the subject of Reagan's damage to American politics and way of life: <http://www.wearethedog.com/2012/07/22/how-reagan-destroyed-america/>.

I find it difficult to reconcile _despising our government_ with patriotism.  I believe that the two do not mesh at all.

Mark_
19 November 2016