I agree with your views regarding less government being a good thing. Just in case some take pride in the number you provided I want to take a moment to put it

I agree with your views regarding less government being a good thing. Just in case some take pride in the number you provided I want to take a moment to put it into some context. > The 2012 Federal government expenditures were 3.54 trillion. Right off the top, the Federal government accounts for 22.6% We thankfully have a canonical example that exposes just how bad government can be: Obamacare. Government is the only organization on the planet that can take a website that could not possibly cost more than one to five million (as a ridiculous maximum) and turn it into a disaster costing upwards of a billion dollars. Think about THAT for a moment. It took government A BILLION DOLLARS just to make a website that the private sector could have delivered for A THOUSAND TIMES less money and in a third of the time. And, of course, it would have worked as required on day one. I am not going to propose government money utilization is a thousand times less efficient than in the private sector across all domains. If I had to guess, based on my direct experience selling to various government agencies and seeing just how convoluted the process can become, I'd say the private sector is 50 to 100 times more efficient at everything. The exception, of course, is killing people and spying on the population. I'll go with 100 times for easy numbers. This means whatever government accomplished with 3.54 trillion could have been done privately for a mere 35 billion. Even if I am off by a factor of ten this is still a major difference. This means that this 22.6% participation is mostly money being burned. The actual real impact of government is probably somewhere in the the 2% or less range. To use the lovely Obamacare canonical government-incompetence-and-waste example. Ask yourself this question: What could we have done with a billion dollars if instead of letting government burn it to try to build a website we had given five million of that to a qualified private entity to build the site and devoted $995 billion to, say, medical research or other massively valuable causes? Right. They just burned money that could have funded the discovery of a cure for Cancer and who knows what else. You have to consider this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Federal_Spending_-_FY_2011.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Federal_Spending_-_FY... and then this: http://nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-101/spending/ http://nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-1... Hard to argue that the money is being spent with both discretion and intelligence. I point you to the 57% in military spending our many wars, pointless foreign aid, Solyndra and the inability to even manage the development of a website as proof. No. Less government is better for all of us.