One of the things that most amuses me about the radical left is how their heads are stuck so deep in the sand you half expect to get a phone call from an irate landscaper somewhere in Beijing bitching about how hard it is to mow around them all. Personally, I blame Lincoln. While the Gettysburg address is a truly inspiring bit of speech writing, it has forever after allowed the more soft-headed around here to actually believe this country, any country, was once "of the people, by the people, for the people", and that today it's not and that this is a Very Bad Thing.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. --Winston Churchill

"The people" have no damned business running a country. "The people" have made Jerry Springer a household name, Ms. Cleo a rich actress, and Benny Hin a beloved (and believed!) preacher. "The people" have given us hanging chads, scratch-and-win lotto, and drive-through windows on liquor stores. "The people" tore down Penn Station and paid out of their own pockets to build Oral Roberts University. Think about it for a second. Do you really want your neighbor in charge of this nation's nuclear arsenal? I think balancing my checkbook drunk is fun. Should I ever be allowed to play with a trillion dollar budget?

What's more, many, probably most, "people" don't really want to be in charge. They want to live their lives and raise their kids, throw darts and shoot guns, learn about the world and travel around to see it. Government is all about boring, nasty, unbelievably petty people trying to get away with boring, nasty, unbelievably petty things, and the vast majority of us are quite happy to let someone else wade around in that particular mosh pit-meets-manure pond.

Really, there are only four kinds of folks interested in government: the greedy bastards, the power hungry lunatics, the rich old farts, and the congenitally pissed off. Good government is a complex dance that constantly tries to play these forces against each other in such a way they don't blow anything up, and still allow them at least a chance to occasionally get something done.

This is why "efficient" governments always sound really good on paper but always end up being more about how fast one man or one group can empty their country's treasury while filling its "re-education facilities" (concentration camps). Because the people you really want to run the place almost never do. Albert Schweitzer is always too busy helping the poor, but boy ol' Albert Speer is just hanging around the beer hall listening to a really noisy Austrian.

Actually, I have no problem with rich old farts running the show, as long as they're being watched. They got rich for a reason, who better to put in charge of making money for an entire nation? I'm not particularly worried about greedy bastards, as long as their interests compliment mine. Power hungry lunatics would at first give me pause, but they'll be protecting me along with themselves. Of the four, I personally find perpetually pissed off people to be the most troublesome. There's nothing more unreasonable than an idealistic 20-something with a cause, but as long as the other three are around they won't get too far.

If you think this is all cynical and heartless and doesn't have to be this way if we'd just all listen, well, I'm sorry but you're still not paying attention. Governments across space and time, history and culture, attract and are infested by dangerous people. Some are garden-variety crackpots and kooks, easy to spot and simple to deal with. There will be others, though, who might mean well, especially at first, but who eventually decide the reason why it's not working out is nobody else is listening to them and it's just a matter of educating these ignorant masses so they'll understand the Rightness of Our Ideals and of course the most efficient way is to send everyone out to be educated at once and anyone who doesn't see this is obviously trying to screw it all up and must be Dealt With Accordingly.

Good government is never really "by", "of", or "for" anybody. Good government is about protecting the citizenry from the predations of evil and the miscalculations of good intent. It's about keeping powerful people busy without allowing them to become unaccountable. It's about building a system that can harmlessly fret away at itself for decades at a time and yet allow quick focus and rapid recalculation in the face of a real crisis. Excellent government provides the bonus of allowing the occasional brilliant leader or exceptional idealist the ability to make their way to the top, while simultaneously providing quick and easy exits when it all just becomes too much for them or, far more importantly, when they decide they've become too much for it.

If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that --Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was not a great man because he wrote good speeches. He was a great man because he saw a system that worked, a system that provided more freedom and opportunity than any that had come before or existed in his day. He was a great man because he did whatever it took to preserve that system, and didn't manage to destroy it in the process. He was a great man because he wrote a simple little speech on the back of an envelope that convinced a bleeding and desperately tired nation that if we'd just hang on a little longer, try a little harder, bleed a little more, we'd become the greatest country on earth.

And you know what? He was right.