Just a follow up...

Thinking along the lines described a few posts down, I want to quote a passage from Ron Paul's book The Revolution: A Manifesto that I feel describes in his terms a certain point I was trying to shed some light on.

I'm inspired by all these political conversations that I have (or don't have) that just serve to alienate myself from the individual or individuals I'm speaking with based on the assumptions that there are just certain aspects of government, along with personally established viewpoints about them, that cannot be changed. The passage is as follows:

"Once government does become involved in something, intellectual and institutional inertia tends to keep it there for good. People lose their political imagination. It becomes impossible to conceive of dealing with the matter in any other way. Repealing the new bureaucracy becomes unthinkable. Mythology about how terrible things were in the old days becomes the conventional wisdom. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy itself, with a vested interest in maintaining itself and increasing its funding, employs all the resources it can to ensuring that it gets a bigger budgest next year, regardless of its performance. In fact, the worse it does, the more funding it is likely to get--exactly the opposite of what happens in the private sector, in which those who successfully meet the needs of their fellow men are rewarded with profits, and those who poorly anticipate consumer demand are punished with losses" (74).