The conservative critique of government is rooted in a Feudalistic notion of property. The point of self-governance is to wrestle property rights away from the encroachment of the king. The king has been dethroned, of course, but the tools of royal coercion still exist in a nefarious and nebulous concept of “the government” which stands over and above the actual forms in which self-government takes place. It’s not a well-thought out idea, more of a visceral reaction. “The government” in this sense is viewed as a distant, foreign, and at times, occupying force. Peculiar, since the anti-government symbolism coexists rather easily with a strong sense of nationalist pride.

The problem is this leads to the destructive habit of cherry-picking. When the government does something I agree with, this is good and right. In what sense? In the confused sense that the people will’s was truly expressed through the principle of self-governance. Similarly, when “the government” does something I disagree with, this is not only bad and wrong, but an attack on the very principle of self-government. Worse, it was undertaken without my consent. Therefore, by definition, it is a violation of the principle of self-government. Other minds will go further, uncovering secret plots and conspiracies rather than the more obvious reason of majority rule.

The schizophrenic view of government is often expressed as a difference between a democracy and a republic. Whether such a distinction ever made sense at any point in history, today it is certainly a meaningless distinction. Modern governments are inherently complex systems requiring a level of organizational and administrative operation that is largely immune from direct democratic rule. As populations grow, as economic activity expands, as social interactions evolve in increasingly sophisticated ways, governments will naturally grow. Those who dream of shrinking government by starving it of revenue seem oblivious to this fact. A government can be both complex and efficient. It can also be small and invasive. Levels are never a good way to measure any system.