While I agree with you to some extent I am not quite ready to be an anarchist, if only for my grandmother's sake. I do believe that the founders of this country deliberately designed it to be mostly gridlocked to try to avoid the worst parts of government.

I did not claim to endorse anarchism. The extent that government can be injected into society is limited by the cost of doing so. If government is everywhere (like it pretty much is or is expanding towards) then it will consume pretty much everything.

If you want to preserve "vital" functions of government, then you need to establish what those are and scrape off anything that is both an expense, and interfering with society.

That's the middle school "checks and balances" view. There is a lot more to it than that. The U.S. government was a desperate reaction to the the ineffective government under the Articles of Confederation. Indeed, the federalists would have made it even stronger if they thought the states would have ratified it.

Are you arguing my point or conceding it?

I'm disagreeing that the founders intended the government to be gridlocked.

Well I disagree with you there, I think it is quite apparent that is what they meant. I also believe that freedom of religion was meant to be used as a catchall freedom. It hasn't yet, but maybe it will later.