Usually, if you don't give the government some power, that power is just taken by the strongest or least scrupulous. If you want to reduce the government's power to tell industry what they can and can't do, you just increase industry's power to control your life or pollute your environment. If that other party gets powerful enough through this method, then they eventually earn the title of "the government" -- so of course governments are the sources of atrocities! The word just means "whoever has the most power". Yes. Atrocities are committed by the powerful against the weak. Of course!

The trick is to stop treating "the government" as some monolithic "other", and work to make the government part of us; made out of the same cloth as everyone else. If you don't like what the government is doing, then get more active in government. Any barriers to everyday citizens becoming active in government should be torn down as much as possible. Then giving the government power is the same as giving everyone power.

This is what libertarians and anarchists never seem to understand (or intentionally ignore). There's no such thing as "limited government" if you think of "the government" as a collection of entities that have power over your life. If you're lucky, you can have some influence on the makeup of those entities: mega-corporations, billionaires, tribal warlords, 70-year-old white supremacists, crime bosses, religious chosen-ones, feudal lords, or us. Let's work hard to skew it toward being us as much as we can, and stop pretending that if we take power out of the hands of one entity that we call "the government", then that power just goes away and nobody else exercises it.