Thank you, I was genuinely curious as to what you had in mind -- I came up with a lot of possible examples, hence the question. I think it's going to come down

Thank you, I was genuinely curious as to what you had in mind -- I came up with a lot of possible examples, hence the question. I think it's going to come down to definitions unfortunately. For example, what do we mean when we say > enforce the minimum basic rules that are necessary to have a civil society One could argue that Brown v Board of Education had little to do with policy and more to do with basic rules for civil society. For your other examples, I can see compelling arguments for why the federal government took this actions (with a justifiable reason). Many of them fall under the fact that the government is ultimately a forum for resolving large scale organizational challenges that the market is not properly incentivized to tackle. Yes, these powers can be abused, and while restricting the government from acting in certain ways may be a method of curtailing those abuses, it would be a tradeoff in terms of the government effectively being able to accomplish its purpose. > But in either case, you're arguing from an implicit assumption that the government is supposed to fix problems, and you're arguing about whether it did a good or a bad job. Nobody ever even asks why the government is intruding in all these activities in the first place, if it's just supposed to be enforcing the basic rules needed to have a civil society. It builds down to a tension between "fix problems" and "enforce basic rules needed to have a civil society." Even in the situations you cite, the two can be in conflict. I suspect a lot of the people that one perceives as trying to use the government to "fix problems" may very well be seeing themselves as "enforcing basic rules needed to have a civil society."