> It appears this is just the way the system is set up.

The wisdom of limited government is that any sufficiently powerful political organization will be corrupted and abused. There is no force worse than corrupted political power. Businesses come and go relatively quickly but governments metastasize and ossify.

> The wisdom of limited government is that any sufficiently powerful political organization will be corrupted and abused.

When accumulated political power is broken up, it doesn't magically return to individuals who are then able to consciously and intelligently allocate it better. It creates a power vacuum (this is one of those terms that was named backwards imo, because its more like a power feeding frenzy). The result is that that power is most likely to be captured by the next most interested actors, only now they aren't even beholden to democracy.

This is, imo, an equally convincing 'just-so' story about political power, but I'm humble enough to recognize that (but not so humble that I won't reply at all).

The thing with these political/organizational structure things, is that they're very complicated and fuzzy. There is no one size fits all prescription that fixes everything. You have to look at all of the underlying incentive structures and untangle them. Otherwise you won't understand what the problem was to begin with. This sucks and is hard.

> only now they aren't even beholden to democracy

Except practically everyone considers our representatives next to useless - look at congress’s approval rating. That’s why if anything local government is the most important. It’s the most limited, fundamentally, and capable of being reformed & truly representative.

Democracy doesn’t even ensure that power isn’t abused, if anything it gives the false impression that abusive power is legitimate because there was an election.

Limited by what? There's a bit of a who-watches-the-watchman problem.

Limited in scope, it’s an important ideal, hard to ever achieve. The more an organization expands its scope, the more certainly it will not only fail to achieve its goals but do great harm.

The question is not what the government is limited to, but who is performing the limiting.

And yet there are effective governments in the world; even in the U.S. (NIST, USGS, FAA, many others). No country has a perfect government, but for any given government function, you can find a country or state that is doing it well. We can examine why it's working well there and try to improve our own government. But that takes a lot of work, and it's much easier to just say "Government bad; burn it all down". Of course when you do that, you're usually just transferring power from an entity that the public has some limited control over, to an entity that the public has no control over. This is, of course, what the very-most corrupt want to happen. Dissolving government and giving that power to profit-seeking corporations is the result of extreme corruption, not the solution to it. Can we instead just all agree to actually try to make things better, instead of constantly burning down anything that's not perfect and telling ourselves Ayn Randian bullshit to make us feel good about it?

I never said we need to burn down government.

That's a very large strawman you just argued.

I'm saying that successful government is limited in nature. And that overgrown government usually not only fails to achieve its goals, it does more harm than were they absent. Look at the past 20 years of military intervention, for example.

> Of course when you do that, you're usually just transferring power from an entity that the public has some limited control over, to an entity that the public has no control over.

This isn't even remotely true. All if not most of our regulatory bodies & bureaucracies are beholden to lobbyists and special interests, so how exactly is that entrenched and unimpeachable corruption more accountable than private interests that are at least subject to competition? Say what you will, but the monopoly power of government is far greater than any private business in my opinion. One has a world-dominating military.

You spoke in extreme absolutes and called it "wisdom". You said:

> any sufficiently powerful political organization will be corrupted and abused

> There is no force worse than corrupted political power

These are your words:

ANY powerful political organization will become corrupted. Every single one, every single time, no matter what.

Corrupted political power is THE WORST force in the universe. It is IMPOSSIBLE to IMAGINE a worse force than corrupted political power. Therefore it's worse than Boko Haram warbands roving around raping villages and forcing children to become their soldiers. That's awful, sure, but it's not as bad as BIG GOVERNMENT! This is a direct and obvious consequence of the words that you wrote; it is not a strawman. Unless you include Boko Haram as "corrupted political power", in which case everything that's bad is defined as corrupted political power and your actual statement is "bad things are bad".

This is a favorite of libertarians. They'll say things like "Truly wise and smart and good-looking people all know that Thing X obviously always definitely happens as a result of Thing Y. Therefore I shouldn't have to pay taxes." Then they vaguely hand-wave at cherry-picked pseudo-evidence like "the last 20 years of military intervention", relying on the reader's brain to conjure up a couple of salient instances like Iraq and Afghanistan and ignoring everything else that's happened in the entire world and outside of their cherry-picked window (Kuwait would like a word about whether U.S. military intervention is always bad).

> That's a very large strawman you just argued

I'm arguing against generic libertarianism, because the hallmark of generic libertarianism is the extreme absolutist statements exactly like the ones you made. If you'd like me to argue against a more nuanced point, you should make that point instead.

> All if not most of our regulatory bodies & bureaucracies are beholden to lobbyists and special interests

This is such a lazy take. There is an enormous number of different government agencies in the U.S. and in the world, and they all have their own, different issues, to different degrees. The world is complicated. Advocating the dissolution of regulatory agencies because "I'm sure they're all corrupt; I mean, just look at 'em!" is lazy and reactionary. It's like saying "All politicians are liars". You're helping the agencies that are most corrupted by lumping them in with the ones that are actually doing a good job. Again: the dissolution of these agencies is the desired outcome of extreme corruption, not the solution to it.

Stop being such a lazy thinker. The world is complicated.

> Stop being such a lazy thinker. The world is complicated.

Please don't ad hominem and strawman instead of engaging my arguments.

> [...] relying on the reader's brain to conjure up a couple of salient instances like Iraq and Afghanistan and ignoring everything else that's happened in the entire world and outside of their cherry-picked window

Iraq and Afghanistan is just a couple of salient instances? It's literally the defining catastrophes of the 21st century, an extremely large, modern, reason for why trust in government has plummeted and there's this cynical sense of helplessness and failure with respect to practically every institution.

You're fighting some imaginary object of your contempt, the "generic libertarian". I'm arguing there's ubiquitous seemingly inevitable failures related to the unbounded scope and mission-creep of government, and you're calling that all idealistic nonsense. Well I have a right to pose my assessment of reality in an open forum of ideas, you can respond substantively but instead it seems you're tilting at windmills.

I think there is a big step made from recognizing the issue to concluding that it is normal. Indeed, scratching beyond the surface, the entire concept of normality per se is pretty difficult to justify.

First, let's call it what it is -- corruption -- and let's not pretend that "the American project" makes it morally any more appropriate than corruption in, say, eastern European or African governments, to reuse old stereotypes.

Yes, special interests have captured the levers of power. It seems as if the Framers had the idea to structure government in such a way that there is a healthy separation between the demos and the control of governmental policy, but they only imagined landed gentry, and not abstract superstructures-cum-monopolies of the rich and powerful, would be the managers of this "democracy".

> Yes, special interests have captured the levers of power. It seems as if the Framers had the idea to structure government

Or the government was captured back then, too, and special interests lobbyied for structural weaknesses.

Quit a lot of compromise and last-minute editing went into our Constitution.

This is true and I wonder if government in the future - maybe on some other planet - may have the equivalent of "separation of church and state".