".......Government can't solve our problems, government is the problem. Now we can all see it for ourselves."
Not a one to defend the government involvement in 'ordinary citizen life' but the issue is not that simple. I quote an article I read sometime ago by Kenneth Friedman, I think:
After describing major social and economical problems facing our country today he writes,".......These developments have exacerbated a polarization between a new evangelical Christian revival and those who are distrustful of religious dogmatism but have no solutions to the very real problems the evangelicals are addressing. Could these trends be harbingers of something more ominous, a more violent fracturing of society?
For a country that has prided itself on its resourcefulness, the inability to address such problems suggests something deeper at work. There is something, powerful but insidious, that blinds us to the causes of these problems and undermines our ability to respond. That something is a set of beliefs, comparable to religious beliefs in earlier ages, about the nature of economies and societies.
These beliefs imply the impropriety of government intervention either in social contexts (libertarianism) or in economic affairs (laissez faire). The faithful unquestioningly embrace the credo that the doctrine of nonintervention has generated our most venerated institutions: our democracy, the best possible political system; and our free market economy, the best possible economic system. But despite our devotion to the dogmas that libertarianism and free market economics are the foundation of all that we cherish most deeply, they have failed us and are responsible for our present malaise. The pieties of libertarianism and free markets sound pretty, but they cannot withstand even a cursory inspection.
Libertarianism does not support democracy; taken to an extreme, it entails the law of the jungle. If government never interferes, we could all get away with murder. Alternatively, if the libertarian position is not to be taken to an extreme, where should it stop? What is the difference between no government and minimal government? Attempts to justify libertarianism, even a less than extreme position, have failed.
Laissez faire, or free market economics, characterized by minimal or no government intervention, has a history that is long but undistinguished. Just as the negative effects of a high fever do not certify the health benefits of the opposite extreme, hypothermia, the dismal failure of communism, seeking
complete government control of the economy, does not certify the economic benefits of the opposite extreme, total economic non-intervention.
It may seem odd, given the parabolic arc of our financial markets and the swelling chorus of paeans to free market economics, but despite the important role of the market, purer free market economies have consistently underperformed well-focused mixed economies. In the latter part of the nineteenth century the mixed economies of Meiji Japan and Bismarck’s Germany clearly outperformed the free market economies of Britain and France. Our own economy grew faster when we abandoned the laissez faire of the 1920s and early
1930s for the proto-socialist policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It has become increasingly sluggish as we have moved back to a purer free market. Data of the past few decades show that our GNP and productivity growth have lagged those of our trading partners, who have mixed economies characterized by moderate government intervention.
The persistently mediocre track record of laissez faire casts doubt on the claim that an economy free from government interference invariably maximizes the wealth of society. In fact, there are sound reasons the pure free market must underperform well-focused mixed economies. But despite laissez faire’s mediocre track record and despite powerful arguments that it cannot possibly provide what it promises, the notion of the unqualified benefit of the free market has become deeply embedded in our mythology. Apologists have exulted in claims that glorify free market mythology at the expense of reality, and also at the expense of society. Free market
principles, even though they have failed in economics, have been eagerly applied to sectors ranging from politics to education, where they have contributed to societal dysfunction.
One politically popular myth, that free market economics and government non-intervention provide the basis for true democracy, flies in the face of history. The first democrats, the classical Athenians, had a word for the ideal free marketer, the homo economicus, working for his own economic gain but unconcerned with the community. It was not particularly complimentary, the ancestor of our word “idiot.” Pericles expressed the sentiment underlying this:
“We regard the citizen who takes no part in these [public] duties not as unambitious but as useless…”
We have ignored the ramifications of this as we remodeled our pantheon.
We have replaced the notion of public-spirited citizens interested in the common weal, a vital part of democratic thought from ancient Athens to our founding fathers, by the invisible hand of the free market. This promises to maximize benefit for society, if only we will be idiots.
In so far as it fails to value disinterested public spirit, free market doctrine only pretends to cherish democracy. Let the people concentrate on their economic gain while their leaders rule in any manner they choose. The Peoples’ Republic of China instituted free market reforms to sustain its autocratic political regime. Augusto Pinochet brutally repressed even mild political dissent while pursuing free market economic policies in Chile.
The reality of our own political power structure is that despite the primacy of our financial markets and our contemporary rituals of democracy, powerful corporations, unions and special interest groups fund political campaigns and exact repayment in the form of enormous influence on legislation. Our government is responsive primarily to these organizations, rather than to citizens. This resembles the corporatism of Mussolini’s Italy more closely than any historic democracy. We are blind to the connection between corporatism and the lack of public interest in politics and in the common good.
In our enthusiasm for the dogma that any government interference is necessarily bad, we forget it was government action that ended child labor. It was government action that outlawed slavery, despite its profitability. It was government action that ended the Great Depression, after years of failure of nonintervention. It was government action that curbed the most virulent expressions of racism, that provided an education for the great majority, that created a large stable middle class. The free market did not achieve any of these
goods, and there is no indication that it ever would have done so.
This is not meant to imply that everything government does is beneficial. But to start from the faith that everything government does is necessarily harmful not only disregards history; it sacrifices the ability, and even the interest, to distinguish between the beneficial and the harmful. Just as the value of government needs to be assessed independent of dogma, the value of the free market has to be gauged in the real world. Free markets provide incentives for innovation.
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
AI
