Crooks and Liars: Mike Lux- 'The Real Mission Of Government: Protecting People, Not Banks'

Source:AZ Quotes- President John F. Kennedy (Democrat, Massachusetts) making the case for limited government with that one quote.

"Right wing forces in this country are obsessed with the size of government, but the fundamental debate we should be having is not the size of government but what the goal of government should be: what should government’s central mission be? 

Right wing forces in this country are obsessed with the size of government, but the fundamental debate we should be having is not about size but what the goal of government should be. What is government’s central mission?

There are four major views on this question in modern American politics, two in each political party.

The first Republican view is boiled down to the central organizing principle that government should be as small as possible. That’s it." 

From Crooks & Liars

I agree with so-called progressive (actually, social democratic) blogger Mike Lux that there are two philosophies in the Democratic Party. I'm a member of the Democratic Party and believe Mike is a member of as well. The debate being about what the role of government should be in America, we just disagree on what those roles are.

As a Liberal Democrat I believe the role of government is to protect individual freedom for people who have and still deserve it and expand individual freedom for those who don't have it, but need and deserve it and I'll get to what I mean by that later.

The social democratic philosophy of what the role of government should be (that I believe Mike Lux subscribes to as a self-described Progressive) is that government's main job is to protect people, even at the expense of individual freedom. So that no one has too much and no one has too little and that means having high tax rates across the board. So government not only has the resources that it need to prevent anyone from having too much or too little . But to invest on the people's behalf to provide the services that Social Democrats don't trust the private sector to provide or provide as well. 

In a free society and liberal democracy, government's job is not to protect people from themselves, but to protect our individual freedoms. And empower people who don't have the freedom over their own lives to obtain that individual freedom for themselves. In a social democracy, the government's job is to literally look out for everyone's welfare and to protect the collective, even if that means sacrificing individual freedom, choice, and even wealth.