The government and it's ever-increasing power: Can we limit it?

[ShakeZula06]

I was really close to making this a post in this thread but I'm deciding to make this a thread in politics because it's off topic and I don't want to hijack.

BigWig's beef in the linked thread (mine too) is that government is proned to oversteppping it's boundaries by legislating morality and making laws that clearly benifit only themselves or those paying them.

Online poker is yet another example of that. It makes me sick that these scumbags are looked at as the leaders of our society.

Those against legislating morallity usually fall into two camps. (1) One camp believes that we need to limit government to stay out of people's personal decisions and the other camp who believes (2) we need to get rid of government. Obviously each has it's own sub-camps, but for the purposes of this discussion at this time it isn't a big thing.

Once I came to terms with the idea that government needs to stay out of personal decisions and stop going after people who commit victimless "crimes" I (I assume most anybody) fell into camp #1 (which would be after I stopped drinking the Republican kool-aid).

However, I have moved to camp #2 with the help of the ACists on this board that I now include myself in. The biggest reason is that I believe that Government is proned to grow bigger and grow larger and larger and control anything it can. Just look at America. The founders set up a Constitutional Republic aimed at having a (relative to the individual states) weak federal government, and a weak executive branch. Well, so much for that.

So the question I pose is, is it possible for the government to actually restrict it's own power? We seen pretty clearly that in the face of a constitution limiting governments power we have still seen it steadly grow over the last ~250 years, so my answer right now is no, but I (would like to think I [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img])am not set in my way of thinking yet.