Say what you will about George Lakoff and his "strict father"/"nurturant parent" framing of political dialogue, I think this article has a lot of valid things to say about our government and why I'm upset with it. To classical liberals like me, the government is not where the buck stops; the citizens make the rules by which the government and everyone in the country must operate, and the government should listen when the people speak. Too many people have come to view government as the boss of the people, not the other way around -- and that is not the principle on which our governmental system is founded.

Our executive branch is out of control, and I am angry at our legislature for not reining the executive in, because the legislative branch is elected by the people to be the vox populi, the people's voice. The Constitution calls for the law-enforcers and the law-makers to be entirely different groups of people. Too often, these days, they are not. I'm grateful to our activist judiciary for its willingness to stand up to a hyperactive executive branch and a legislative branch which appears to be asleep at the wheel.

enochsmiles has written a lot recently about police abuse of force, often with Tasers. In the videos I've watched, the cops who end up tasing somebody seem to have an attitude of "I am the cop, therefore I make the rules and you must do whatever I say." This attitude is often directly espoused, in pretty much those exact words, by people who defend police use of force against someone who was questioning them. It is wrong. The police are part of the executive branch of government. They do not make rules; they enforce rules. Police have quite a bit of discretion available in deciding how they will enforce the rules it is their job to enforce; this is why police carry weapons at all, so that they can physically back up their legal authority to enforce the laws the population has caused to be made. When a cop says "I tased him because he wasn't listening to me," that is the wrong answer, because there is no law which says police get to make up the rules on the spur of the moment.

A government which has forgotten that it is the servant of its citizens is a government which must be reined in at all costs. Like fire, government can be an excellent servant, but it is always a terrible master.