....and this is something that has extended into my adult life as well, probably to an even higher degree. When you are a kid, or at least when I was a kid, we have civics class and social-studies class where one of the things that they really try to iron into you is the case of the government having the best interests of the US citizenry at heart and the things that they do are for the betterment of all of the population.
I think that most kids just blindly believed that this was true because if you didn't answer things correctly on the tests, you would get the questions wrong. I don't think that I was ever taught to be critical of the government at all at any point in my educational background and a lot of the early attitudes I acquired about the government came from the only other place it really could come from in the 80's and early 90's: My parents.
My parents are rednecks just like me, almost everyone I knew growing up was a redneck and most rednecks feel a sense of simply wanting to be left alone by the government. It could be self-fulfilling or it could be because we choose these communities based on the local rules or perhaps the local rules bend to the will of the population. I can say this with near certainty when it comes to where I live in North Carolina because if you own land in the county that I live in, you can basically do whatever you want with it. There is no applying for permits to put a shed in your backyard and if you want to grow vegetables in your front yard, this might be frowned upon by your neighbors, but it isn't illegal.
Our local legislators realize that the population is not going to tolerate any rules here that result in the government being all up in our business with everything that we are doing in our lives and that is most likely why they stay in office. The officials are extremely apprehensive to ever increase or introduce new taxes regardless of what the good intent behind it is meant to be. The people here will not tolerate this sort of redistribution of wealth and if and local government official tries to do this, they will not be in office for very long. We are a gun nut, stay off my lawn, don't tread on me type of community and even our state officials such as the liberal governor realizes that we will not bend the knee to his rules.
During Covid, my county and the city of New Bern basically determined on our own that we were not going to adhere to any of the lockdown rules or mask rules and the governor and the state police stood aside and let us do what we wanted. If you could go back in time a year and wander around here, you wouldn't have thought we were ever in a pandemic and that was the prevailing opinion of our population. Were we correct throw caution to the wind and defy all state rulings? Maybe, maybe not! All I know is that our community decided on its own that we were not going to stay home, we were not going to socially distance, we were not going to close restaurants and shops, and even though I don't participate in it, we were not going to close churches either. The governor had thinly-veiled threats that he proposed on our little community but then the Sheriff, who is an elected official, knew that he better refuse to enforce the rules or he would be out of the job as well. Same goes with the city and county councils. They were not going to become tyrannical towards their local population because the population would remove them if they even tried.
Now I don't know who this guy is nor do I even know if he said this. It still is a very profound statement that I believe to be true and I can see it in my own operations that my business does. I am sometimes the recipient of government contracts for construction and when I get these projects I know that we can just spend as much money as we want because the government doesn't have any real checks and balances as far as spending is concerned. There are no consequences for going wildly over budget. The government solution to these sorts of things is to quietly throw more money at whatever the project happens to be and hope that nobody notices. I'm benefitting from this so I'm certainly not going to tell anyone. My crews all benefit from it as well.
This is a tiny part of the government that I am exposed to on a regular basis and if it exists on projects that are just a couple of hundred thousand dollars, imagine the crazy mismanagement of funds that must happen when they start talking about projects that cost billions. The money just gets siphoned out of the hands of the public and ends up in the pockets of private individuals who are more likely than not, connected to the government in some way or another. They don't really even try to be very covert about it anymore and when someone does get caught they will either create a fall guy or work with their media partners to paint said person as innocent or the target of political character assassination. Truth be damned!
I'm not really a part of any political party and for the most part I believe they are all self-serving and not at all the good guys. While there probably are some good guys in the government I think there is a very sinister reason why people pursue elected jobs that don't even pay that well and it costs them many times more than the salary to get elected to the position to begin with. It's corrupt right out of the gate.
I may never be rich and I am ok with that. In the meantime I, just like my parents before me, just want the government to leave me alone and stay off my lawn. I don't really care who is in office, just keep your paws out of my pocket and your feet off my property.