Government as a big fat leech

I was tickled some time ago to find something I wrote on a friend's signature line in a forum: "... government is not a big fat pig, it's a big fat leech." It was a pleasant surprise - pleasant because it's always a rush to be quoted (Did I just date myself by using the word "rush"?), and a surprise because it wasn't until it was repeated that I realized I'd written something worth repeating.

The cliché, of course, is to describe government as the big fat pig with many, many little piglets sucking at its teats, but the fact is so many of those piglets aren't being nourished - because the "pig" is sucking back. To benefit from the government's largesse, you must (at the minimum) surrender your privacy and beg for the cash, and you very likely won't get all that you ask for.

Thus the analogy of the leech, especially in the old sense where it was thought attaching a leech to yourself could solve medical problems. In reality, the leech sucked out your blood in exchange for very little benefit. Yep, that's our present-day concept of government, all right.

Someone who doesn't grok me or libertarian thought suggested the other day that those of us who stand for limits on government are basically telling the poor to "go fuck themselves."* He asked if I thought "society" has an obligation to care for children whose parents cannot or will not. My reply: "Yes, we do. And one-size-fits-all government programs developed in Washington by politicians have thrown billions of dollars down a rathole without helping those children. As I stated above, the only children who reap the benefits of those dollars are the wealthy children of well-paid bureaucrats."

Mind you, we is a word I used in the heat of battle, and I should not have committed anyone but myself to the answer. He was using "society" as if the word were synonymous with "government." I was trying to shake him out of that thought and try to get him thinking of solutions that don't involve taking people's money by use or threat of force and redirecting it toward "programs." This is the basic flaw in the argument he was making: He believes government is "We the People" just like it says there at the beginning of the Constitution. Therefore anything "our representatives" do to us is OK because they were elected by "We the People" and so anything they do is a result of majority will doing its democratic thing. The government is us, you see. Nice theory. Not reality.

It seems to me that the truly needy - people who just cannot fend for themselves - will get more actual help from friends, neighbors and motivated strangers, freely and willingly offering a helping hand, than they will get help from Washington, D.C., your friendly state capital or city hall. And the extent to which they don't get that help is in direct proportion to the extent to which "We the People" have made the bogus assumption that the government is there to provide that help.

If you were to see an assault in progress, what would you do - try to stop the assault or call a cop "because that's what the police are there for"? If you were to see a person weak from hunger, or struggling to climb back into a wheelchair, would you feed him or give him a lift, or would you call Social Services "because that's what the government is there for"? Government gives potential Good Samaritans an excuse to keep walking and ignore the need. And, like the leeches of old, applying government solutions to the needy mostly just sucks the life out of them.
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* Do you know this is the first time in nearly 400 posts that I've inserted the word fuck into this conversation? I didn't realize how hard I try not to use "those words" until I hesitated in midthought and pondered whether to type "fuck" or "f***" or the like. It's a perfectly, um, serviceable word; I guess I just enjoy the search for alternatives.