Reason #437 that I'm a limited government conservative

George Will on Fox News Panel:
"There are two ways to make the conservative case for proper suspicion of government based on questions about its competence and its motives.

 You can read Madison Montesquieu,  the Federalist papers, and Jefferson or you can sit back and wait for the government to behave the way it did this week."

Liberals have a hard time responding to conservatives' avowed belief in small, limited government with anything other than ridicule and accusations of small-heartedness. 

But maybe conservatives are just noticing, say, thousands of years of human history and speculating that maybe human nature is a thing.  Lord Acton wrote that "Power corrupts and Absolute Power corrupts absolutely."  Maybe people who have control over others - whether they're government officials or thirteen year old girls at the top of a social clique - tend toward wielding that power for their own ends.  And maybe political philosophers who have thought and written on this topic in lengths greater than bumper sticker messages or tweets had a point when they argued that government might need to be limited.

Whether it's through displaying arrogance and incompetence (Obamacare exchange rollout, post war management in Iraq) or arrogant political venality (the desire to inflict as much pain on the electorate they are elected to serve through the administration of the shut down in order to punish the administration's political enemies) or whether it's just plain old fashioned conflict of political interests and philosophies (the failure to pass a budget or to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government), the federal government never fails to give you a reason to desperately want to limit and constrain it.

The rational reaction to that dysfunction (or Madison might argue, its natural function) is to give the government strict limits, enumerated powers, and checks and balances; it's NOT to advocate expanding its powers by asking the government to take on more completely regulating 16% of the American economy and micro-manage increasing spheres of private behavior.