Monstrous

But this is the antithesis of President Obama's vision of a new Constitution (or a new Bill of Rights) that proclaims what government must do for you rather than what it cannot do to you. Alas, as I've discussed before, while that sounds admirable it is monstrous, since government has nothing to give — it can do for one only by taking from another. If that is to be our system, we are no longer free.

-Andy McCarthy, post at The Corner

The State

The State has no money. It produces nothing. Its existence is purely parasitic, maintained by taxation; that is to say by forced levies on the production of others…What such schemes (as Social Security) actually come to is that the workman pays his own share outright; he pays the employer’s share in the enhanced price of commodities; and he pays the government’s share in taxation. He pays the whole bill; and when one counts in the unconscionably swollen costs of bureaucratic brokerage ones sees that what the workman-beneficiary gets out of the arrangement is about the most expensive form of insurance that could be devised consistently with keeping its promoters out of jail.
-Albert Jay Nock, via Jonah Goldberg

Nanny State

The fundamental insight of libertarianism is that the government is the government. It cannot be your mommy, your daddy, your big brother, your nanny, your friend, your buddy, your god, your salvation, your church or your conscience. It is the government. A big bureaucracy charged with certain responsibilities, some of which it is qualified to carry out, many of which it is not.
-Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism blog

Utterly Dysfunctional

Now, the federal government is utterly dysfunctional. Its actual capabilities, under any conceivable leadership, peter out just the other side of delivering mail. Our billion-dollar intelligence agencies know squat. Our big entitlement programs are all headed for fiscal cliff edges. The Department of Education is sunk in puerile fantasies about there being no such thing as dumb kids. (Worse than that, even: they operate on the principle that there is no such thing as an un-bookish kid.) Does anyone know what the Departments of Energy, Labor, Transportation, and the Interior do? I'll guarantee, whatever it is, they do it badly.
-John Derbyshire, at The Corner