But today I find myself spending an inordinate amount of time defending my rights against the very regimes that were supposed to protect them. It is eating up my leisure time, and what goes on while I'm at work goes unmonitored. They steal from my pantry while I'm out plowing my fields. What's more, they use their plunder against me, giving my tax dollars to grant-grubbing special interests whom I oppose, who advocate enacting more policy that further reduces my freedom. The bulk of said plunder doesn't even go to help the people the pandering politicians pretend to want to help.
I attend city and county council meetings. State and federal legislature meetings are too far away and are too full time for me to monitor directly. But I've seen the sausage being made, and I think if you were really aware of what goes on in there, you'd be alarmed as well. Even some of the ones on "our side" (whichever side that happens to be) don't understand the proper role of government.
Don't even get me started on administrative bureaucracies that by definition, aren't responsible to the voters. They enact regulations having the force of law, but we have no recourse. We can't vote them out. That is not government by the consent of the governed! The fact is, the government we have bears no resemblance whatsoever to the mechanisms that were invented to keep us safe. It's Fahrenheit 451, without the fire trucks.
