What else is the government for? I understand it's a popular Reagan talking point but I don't really grok it.
If you assume the govt doesn't work for us, particularly if you're in politics, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Anyone can make a government that sometimes does good. The challenge is to create a government that cannot do unfathomable evil.
This is a nuanced and thoughtful position. The statement "The 9 words you never want to hear are I'm from the government and I'm here to help"" is not nuanced and thoughtful, it doesn't suggest governments do good and bad, it positions governments (and their agents) as incapable of doing good. That someone from the government trying to help you must not be, for whatever reason.
It's like don't talk to Cops or corporate HR works for the company and not you.
If you were to take it at face value and debate it against it, you would be making the fallacy error of secundum quid. If you want to have a real discussion about how much good and or bad the government does, you need to find a real human to have that discussion with. The saying alone is a not complete self-contained philosophy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secundum_quid#:~:text=Secund...
People in government will abuse their positions as much as possible.
So limiting government as much as possible is the goal.
Good example is pandemic. Governments saved a small number of people by collapsing economies. Quit possibly killing more people then were saved. There is a very good argument that the best thing governments could have done is “nothing”.
People constantly rail about the evil wrought by big business, and they're right to do so, but what is the government (in the US anyway), but the biggest (and perhaps most corrupt) business of all? Except it's not constrained by the requirement to turn a profit, so it doesn't suffer the bad consequences of failure, because you can always print more money.
And you're absolutely right about the pandemic response.