Bob, you have a good heart, but you need to stop and consider a few of the things you're saying.
There's a constant high level of background noise in your posts that filters down to "The government is evil. Government is always the problem. Government makes people weak and passive."
Government is the expression of the will of the people. It may do wise things or foolish things. But it is ultimately no better or worse than any other center of power and influence. The alternatives are the Union Hall, the Church and the Boardroom.
The Union Hall is gone. Almost forty years of unremitting war against organized labor has destroyed its political power. The race to the bottom was considered a paranoid fantasy in the days of the last liberal in the White House - Richard Nixon. Today we have been taught from the cradle that it is an inexorable Law of Nature. Labor can not bargain for the marginal product of its own input. Wages have been stagnant or falling as a portion of GDP for decades. Pensions are a thing of the past. We get less vacation time than any developed nation and use a smaller fraction of it. Healthcare is going the same way. The forty hour work week is a pale joke. The NLRB now spends more time rolling back the last seventy years of workers' protections than seeing to their rights.
The Church is close to the most horrible center of power imaginable. By its own standards it can never be wrong. It has the right and duty to impose its will on every aspect of human life. Its corrosive effect on human rights, science, the arts, political freedom and just about everything else in the public sphere is difficult to overestimate. There was a reason the Founders were children of the Enlightenment, not the Reformation. They abhorred and feared the idea of a "Christian government".
Wall Street? Take a look at what you get with the Untrammeled Power of Business. You get Bear Sterns, Enron, Global Crossing, Wal Mart and so on. General Motors spends hundreds of billions of dollars to destroy the very idea of mass transit and redesign cities so that people will be forced to use its products exclusively. Short term thinking rules. If you do anything that does not "maximize shareholder equity" you will be replaced. Run a company into the ground and you can loot it on the way down. Lie? Cheat? It's only a problem if you get caught. And that won't happen because Business has been freed from the Nanny State with its onerous regulations and laws.
Remember that race to the bottom? Where do you think it came from? There are laws in place to keep people from bringing any unfavorable fact about anything related to the food industry to light. Safety, health, living wages, even what you do with your spouse in the privacy of the marriage bed and what you eat or smoke on your own time are grist for their mill. Halliburton in Iraq is a perfect example. Female employees are raped to the point where they are bleeding from their
anuses. Object? You'll never work again. Go to the authorities? You are stuck with binding arbitration with Halliburton's internal arbitrator. And our embassy/fortress is being built
quite literally with slave labor.
For the last forty years we've had the most expensive and all-pervasive propaganda machine in human history singing a refrain. Government is evil. Democracy is a sham. The rich are that way because they are better, smarter and more touched by the gods than the rest of us. Whatever they want is better than what we could possibly dream for ourselves. We should shun the power that comes from our collective will and turn everything over to them. "They" are the Church and the Boardroom. They are turning us into a Third World dictatorship with a President whose advisors refer to him as the "Sovereign" to quote John Yoo's memo. Income and wealth distribution are quite literally in line with Bolivia and Uruguay. Johnson's Great Society is gone. The Great Compression which did so much to create the Middle Class is gone. The New Deal is almost gone. And the K-Street/Wall Street Axis is hard at work on the Constitution.
This is what happens, Bob, when the People take your advice and run in terror from their own power. It means that they have nothing with which to defend themselves from the utterly selfish and amoral powers of the Cross and the Dollar. Far from "Big Government doing everything for us" we have a government which does little or nothing for us but more to us at the behest of the super-rich. During America's heyday - the 50s through the early 80s - it did quite a bit, more than it does now. That worked pretty well. During the 1930s and 1940s it saved us from Fascist treason, bloody unrest and a World War. It can grow out of control. It can become corrupt just like anything else that gives men wealth and power. But we really can't do without it. Suck it up. Deal with the reality you have rather than the fantasy.
Private industry does a quantifiably, verifiably crappy job of handling large scale-long term systems like health, transportation, power, water, prisons and schools. Where profit is an effective motivating and regulating force in these fields it only works when there's an independent third party representing the interests of those whom the infrastructure is supposed to benefit. That is to say, the government.
We can not go back to being a nation of small shop owners and single-family farmers. That romantic ideal never really was how we lived. It worked for a while sorta kinda. That was mostly because income and wealth were not ideally but at least reasonably equitably distributed. There was a lot of resources available relatively cheaply on an expanding frontier. To make things work we need a government that is effective, transparent, accountable and not overly friendly to Wall Street. In short, we need to grow up and stop wishing that the Magical Fairy in the Sky be He Jesus or The Invisible Hand will somehow miraculously make it all better.
Communism doesn't work.
Capitalism doesn't work.
Mixed economies can work, but it takes work to make them work.
Slogans and magical thinking really don't work.
