If any particular wingnut slogan could be said to have caused the greatest damage to government's ability to provide the services and fulfill the functions that only an organization unswayed by the allure of profit could do, it is this, "Government should be run like a business."

This idea has been banging around forever, and while on its face it seems like an earnest attempt to improve the workings of the government, and perhaps for some ignorant few it really is, most of the informed participants in this debate are really advocating for shrinking it in the guise of making it more efficient. Because nothing says efficiency like the inability to provide critical services due to a budget-induced staffing shortage.

But here's the thing, even if one were disposed to believing that the government could do more with less, how to reconcile the unavoidable fact that it is currently smaller than it's been for 50 years? Or the fact that those employees whose jobs weren't outsourced or downsized make 27.67 percent less than comparable private sector workers?

Really, though, I think the question at root can't be an expression of libertarian faith in free markets. Government isn't always the best vehicle through which to deliver goods and services, but for all the things we as a people have agreed are necessary and indispensable, the human services like healthcare for small children and the elderly, food assistance for the poor, emergency aid for disaster areas, these things and many more are susceptible to exactly the kind of rapacious capitalism most people find detestable. Americans never begrudge their neighbor's right to earn a buck, but it's a moral transgression to charge a drowning man a premium for your lifejacket.

No, the question libertarians from organizations like the Cato Institute don't want their audience asking themselves is not the oft repeated "What is the role of government?" I think the question they want to keep Americans away from is, "What is government?" Because, if one were to honestly reflect on that question, the inevitable answer returns, "I am the government."

And it's very hard for corporate funded wingnuts to sell their austerity message to people who see the United States Federal government as something of which they are part, rather than as the unknowable alien fiend they go to great pains to characterize it as. The former makes it very hard for people determined to turn America's citizens against its government. And that destructive end, the cannibalization of this society's greatest potential for the enrichment of a very few powerful funders, is the raison d'être of organizations like Cato. Even in these impossible times, these people have continued to work public sentiment to their purposes. And that is incredibly destructive.

Now, as our identity crumbles, as our people cleave more to ideology than to each other, as families have been torn asunder by empty, hollow rhetoric, we need to get to work. This is where wingnuts really shine, impeding the recovery after their failed ideology has brought us to the brink and then shoved us off. Where America needs Romulus to build us up, Cato and its anti-intellectual ilk play Remus. Where we need new infrastructure, new focus on national goals and priorities, libertarians want dissolution and disaffection. America needs unity of purpose to tackle common challenges; Cato wants a society of hermits who defend their lawns and their lives against all encroachment.

Thomas Paine wrote of the freedom afforded to every citizen of a society stemming from their willing relinquishment of the authority to self-enforce certain natural rights. He spoke of every man's right to justice, but to the unequal distribution of means to secure it. In Paine, more than the other Enlightenment thinkers, we have a clarity of vision and a keen ear for rhetoric to explain this new phenomenon of free men dedicated to self-government as a means of assuring perpetual liberty.

By contrast, the libertarian equivalent of freedom leaves every man very much less free, as their inability to assure the comprehensive catalogue of rights imprinted upon the American character by virtue of no other accomplishment than birth is branded upon a populace divided against itself. While promising a higher character of liberty than can be attained by the collective power of an entire nation, the freedom offered by these wingnuts is the freedom to starve, the freedom to freeze, and the freedom to suffer under men more capable of imposing their will upon the world around them. The freedom offered by these people who advocate shrinking government until it no longer has any discernible purpose or power is the freedom to never know freedom again.

This is the reason why government is not a business. The equal dissemination of civil rights predicated on every man's natural rights to the necessities of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is antithetical to persons that fantasize about a land of distrustful strangers concerned only with their small patch of ground and the meager gathering of property they can defend.

And yet, despite the perseverence of public cranks like Rand Paul and his cantankerous father, despite the brisk sales of Atlas Shrugged and the renewal of supply-side faith in mainstream circles, I have some small hope that the American public might see this attempt to break apart the more perfect union we've strived to form over the past two centuries. And it is just this, E Pluribus Unum. If the land that took the phrase "Out of many, one" as its motto cannot understand how the effort to liberate us all, one from the other, is a strategy for devouring us all individually, then there really is no hope for reason in humans.