I am just getting on line here in Germany (it’s 9:45 am) and missed last night’s thread about why Charles abandoned the Right. I was never on board, but I agreed with the Jeffersonian notion that “the government is best that governs the least”.

Unfortunately, the Right took that to its extremem: the ideal government is one that does not govern at all.

And in those areas where it is expected to operate, such as the military, it does not audit or control its spending, it just trusts private contractors to act in the public interest.

Jefferson’s ideal would work if we were all yeoman farmers, living on our own land, barely within sight of the smoke from our neigbor’s chimney. In a world where we enter into contracts and agreements entirely voluntarily and out of our sense of self-interest.

But that was more of an ideal than a reality even in Jefferson’s time and is even less applicable now.