"That government is best which governs least."

[flamin lib]

Thomas Paine

Well, Tom, how ya' like that Haiti? Somalia? Afghanistan?

[abelenkpe]

1. He lived during a different time

So I'll cut him some slack. It's the pinheaded libertarians that keep repeating that mantra today I worry about most.

[lunatica]

2. Then why bother to even have gubmint?

That one has always puzzled me. So what's the role of government in a Democracy?

[tjwash]

9. Ask my gay brothers and sisters in Cali how putting everything up to a popular vote works out.

You have to temper the mob-rule at times. Otherwise we would still be importing slaves, and women would be still be considered 2nd class chattel.

[Kalyke]

17. Heck, women are still considered second-class chattel to a lot of men today!

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

3. "Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one

Tom Paine

Old Tom knew what he was talking about.

[Sukie]

4. Paine wanted the citizens to be in control of what their

representatives did. He believed in the mantra, "for the people, by the people".

[Orsino]

12. He certainly wouldn't have argued for corporations acting unchecked as de facto governments. n/t

[melm00se]

5. there is a bit of disagreement

on who said this when. Thomas Jefferson's full quote on this is:

"That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves."

[flamin lib]

8. Was aware of the double attribution. However,

Jefferson sounds like Alan Greenspan on banking regulation. Remember the congressional testimony, “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.”

[melm00se]

15. thoreau too n/t

[hobbit709]

6. Democracy is the worst possible form of government

except for all the other ones-Churchill.

[StarfarerBill]

7. In Paine's day, government was nothing but a yoke on the people's collective neck.

Taking taxes and land, and giving nothing but poverty and war. It's doing a better job now, but still needs vast improvement.

[shraby]

10. One has to remember that when they founded this country,

almost all governments were extremely repressive, mixed church and state to control people, and was something that was not only hated but feared but recognized as necessary.

[tjwash]

11. Another day...another twisting of an out of context quote.

nt

[flamin lib]

13. Oh please . . . . nt

[Igel]

14. The proper response is that in your examples

there is no governing, hence no actual government.

The continuation is also useful.

The general attitude was that governmental soundness depended upon the virtue and moral rectitude of the governed. The laws reflected that subset of morality needed for government and weren't so much written for the (numerous) righteous as for the (rare) sinner; they also weren't all-encompassing, since private morality was judged to be no less important to society but private and not the government's business. There's this quote, another that we have good constitution--if we can keep it; that it was a constitution written for a virtuous people.

A shift to taking the laws as being the basis for public morality would have struck them as backwards because in that case the laws reflect a minority's virtue to be imposed on the majority. This is neither democratic nor conducive to good government. Moreover, it leads to dependence on governmental morality to determine private morality, which requires extensive governmental apparatus and expansive legal codes to determine all the nooks and crannies that a moral and virtuous people would be able to sort out independently.

Paine's comments were from a culture far removed from our own. In many ways, it's a foreign language to us.

Afghanistan could survive nicely--and did survive nicely--with a government that barely governed. Pashtunwali may have been harsh, but it was non-governmental. It was tribal. Expanding Pashtunwali to the governmental level was a mistake, because the Hazara and other ethnicities had their own equally workable codes. However, their code wasn't conducive to great economic and material progress. The same can be said for Somalia, where a set of tribal norms and customs allowed for fairly limited government for a long time.

Haiti never really managed to acquire a society in reasonable equilibrium, and it's still not really in equilibrium. Between outside influences and internal instability, one could argue that 'governs least' for Haiti still means a fair amount of government.

[flamin lib]

18. Thank you so much for a thoughful response.

Those are becoming increasingly rare these days as we seem to moving to a one or two line knee jerk response or even the more abbreviated "+1" or Unrec without courtesy of a reason.

Still, I maintain that Haiti, Somalia and Afghanistan all have governments that either will not or cannot govern making the less/best sentiment demonstrably wrong. They are, after all, governing very little.

[melm00se]

16. the key to this whole conversation

is that government should be the servants of the People, not the other way around.

Once that line is crossed you can easily (and you could argue inevitably) tip over into a tyranny.

[NightWatcher]

19. then let's have totalitarian control like North Korea, China, Soviet Union, Nazi Germany...

[GreenMetalFlake]

20. social control via the illusions (i.e. big lie) is the preferred method of america