Too much

Why are you so suspicious about the intentions of the government? What have you got to hide? We have to reply that it is they, the government and its apologists, who are doing the hiding. They are attempting to conceal a power claim that has no limit. We believe that government does not want power just in order to carry out some set of purposes, but that government has turned into the grasp for power for its sake, and is now this and nothing more. All the good intentions oriented to public service have given way to the imperative to come up with what the government demands and to submit to whatever it imposes on us, in the belief that it can be satisfied and will then allow us some space in which to carry out our own business, whereas it will always and immediately demand more. It appears to have no sense of its own limits. In this it has become absolutist and dictatorial. This is morally corrupting for those employed by government agencies and so are complicit in this power grab, and it is corrupting for all of us in the rest of the economy who attempt to act as though the government acknowledges our authority to act for ourselves on our own account, while of course our purposes are deflected, our effort misdirected and resources misallocated by our attempts to give government what it demands, while pretending that these demands are limited and purposeful while they rather in fact unlimited and directed to taking away from us all freedom to act on our own behalf. Left to itself the government will attempt to swallow the nation. What cannot stop itself must be stopped. This is why we say what we do.