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"When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."

It's not so much tyranny that we fear these days but rather the consequences of ceding more and more power to such a corrupt and inept bunch.

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Or the realisation that WE are that corrupt and inept bunch. It's not like government workers are a 'special elite' class...

Not in our minds, but these people see others with power and think if only they had that power, preferably centralized (who likes redundancies??? DRY!), they could do something really special. They are The Anointed[1]. They've cracked the code somehow. But they get to the helm only to discover there's 10 other hands on the wheel, and no one can see the effect until well after the next election cycle.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Vision-Anointed-Self-Congratulation-S...

This is an excellent point. This may seem off-topic, but I realized some time ago during the debates about minimum wage increases, it wasn't the managers of fast food joints being the loudest opposition, it was lower-middle class people who don't want to give up their $1 cheeseburgers, no matter what the societal costs.

If you create distance between a person and the consequences of their evil, they become more likely to tolerate their evil.

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