“But it can be fairly acknowledged that some forms of government, just on principle, are inherently better systems than others and allow the human spirit, the individual, the best shot at the most freedom and the most ability to live their lives the way they want, free from restraint.”
All government is bad because its fundamental nature is an agency with the power to initiate force against individuals. The real difference between a less bad government and a very bad government is size. Technically we have the same “kind” of government today as we had immediately after the Constitution was ratified. The reason individuals were mostly free then, and why we are mostly oppressed today is not because the kind of government has changed, but because the government has grown so big. That happens with all governments.
Hank
Well, government may very well be bad, but in this current life, without some form of government (which there will always be some form of between men, different peoples, etc), life would be far, far worse, and possibly unlivable for many people. Government is a necessary evil in the present world. It’s a necessary evil, and it’s best to keep it limited and small and very narrow in its authority because fallen people make up government, and by that very fact, that makes eternal vigilence against government imperative by every citizen.
Size isn’t really a big difference between bad and worse government, all size does is determine how such a government, bad or worse, can inflict itself on either a small amount of people or a larger amount of people. For example, the state government of Michigan is probabl viewed as being bad by individual citizens across the state, but the state level, hardly often reaches out and goes after a specific individual and makes their life terrible. At the same time, consider the extremely awful smaller government of Detroit. This smaller government makes life a lot more terrible, much closer to home, to a smaller number of people, but they can inflict a lot more real damage on individuals living in that city.
As for your final point, the thing that has made government grow in this country has been three things. First, rising secularism since the 1850s due to humanist worldviews, with people calling for government and government institutions to take over services and teaching in areas traditionally done by the church or other Christian organizations. Second, turning away from God and our own self-control, which the founders relied upon for their form of such a free government to work - our Constitution and governments could only work, according to them, if people policed themselves. As more and more citizens have lost that ability and have lost the Christian worldviews that underpins such an ability to police ourselves and treat others as we’d like to be treated (and provides a clear reason WHY we should do this), government has had to create more laws in order to deal with the growing lawlessness of this nation the last 230+ years. This is why we are less free today. The third reason is a fundamental shift in how people view government that took place in the progressive era and continues today, namely, that government should be responsible for welfare, taking care of people in calamities, retirement, and allocate public money for a whole host of desires, causes and programs anyone could think of. Welfare, education, government make-work programs, all kinds of public assistance, that never go away, always use up more resources than ever thought, and have people always begging to be expanded. These three things are all inter-related and all contribute to why things are the way they are today.