(Great American) Faith in Government

Many people say they love small government -- but their tune is quite different when it comes to carrying out war as diplomacy by funner means.  Suddenly, they have great faith in government's right and ability and even duty to carry out war. Suddenly, government is never wasteful, and never overeager, and should never be questioned.  It's odd.

I often puzzle over the difference between bona fide libertarians and conservatives who pay lip service to small government.  True libertarians seem intellectually consistent -- they don't believe that government is an effective mechanism for most things, so they seek to allow the free market and private enterprise to handle many domestic matters; and they have reduced expectations for what they can accomplish overseas.

A distrust of government can be founded on a view that human folly, fueled by taxes, is a recipe for disaster.  But such thinking often evaporates in the mind of the small-government conservative when our government begins to plan $50 billion wars that become $500 billion wars. 

We may need one qualification, though:  If Bill Clinton says that we must go to war, he's just a naive, big-spending nation-builder; if a Republican says that we must go to war, he's a new Churchill. 

So maybe it begins with us vs. them politics domestically, then becomes an us vs. them issue globally.  And it could be summed up as, "it's not big, wasteful government when I'm doing the wasting."