You are the stars

[Galen]

(07-30-2016, 12:20 AM)Eric the Obtuse Wrote: Not much to add. The enlightenment pushed individual rights. Libertarians push the individual as all important to the point of blaming government for most problems because it restricts the individual. All government action they say violates the non-violence principle. But the enlightenment never said we don't need laws and government. It said we needed government by consent of the governed.

You clearly have not read much of the works of the because if you had you would know that they believed in a limited government.  They also maintained that government should be as decentralized as possible.  Even Alexander Hamilton, which is the only founder the lefties like, would be appalled at the size an scope of the Federal Government now.

As for how a minarchist libertarian sees the role of government I give you this from Mises:

• As the liberal sees it, the task of the state consists solely and exclusively in guaranteeing the protection of life, health, liberty, and private property against violent attacks. Everything that goes beyond this is an evil. A government that, instead of fulfilling its task, sought to go so far as actually to infringe on personal security of life and health, freedom, and property would, of course, be altogether bad.
  

Indeed Mises described you and the others like you:

• In fact, however, the supporters of the welfare state are utterly anti-social and intolerant zealots. For their ideology tacitly implies that the government will exactly execute what they themselves deem right and beneficial. They entirely disregard the possibility that there could arise disagreement with regard to the question of what is right and expedient and what is not. They advocate enlightened despotism, but they are convinced that the enlightened despot will in every detail comply with their own opinion concerning the measures to be adopted. They favour planning, but what they have in mind is exclusively their own plan, not those of other people. They want to exterminate all opponents, that is, all those who disagree with them. They are utterly intolerant and are not prepared to allow any discussion. Every advocate of the welfare state and of planning is a potential dictator. What he plans is to deprive all other men of all their rights, and to establish his own and his friends' unrestricted omnipotence. He refuses to convince his fellow-citizens. He prefers to "liquidate" them. He scorns the "bourgeois" society that worships law and legal procedure. He himself worships violence and bloodshed.
  

As for what government is:

• Government is beating into submission, imprisoning, and killing...The authority of man-made law is entirely due to weapons of the constables who enforce obedience to its provisions.
  

This last what the Boomers worship of government, from both the left and right, along with their need make the rest of us conform to their wish has brought to the US.  This is why we currently live in a functionally bankrupt police state.

As the kiwi has noted the US is really a collection of separate societies.  She referred to Americians as tribal which not a bad observation from someone who doesn't live here.  The only solution is to put the Federal government back into the bounds of the Constitution but that is an anathema to Eric the Obtuse and the modern liberal.