Trust and Obey, For There's No Other Way, To Be Happy in Government…

In what circumstances should you trust the government? That's an easy enough question to answer here at Hit & Run, where suspicion of government, like home-brewing and Neal Stephenson fandom, is built into the cultural DNA.  

But as my former colleague Conor Friedersdorf points out, it's a question that causes a lot of tension in mainstream political debates. And it's the crux of today's back-and-forth between Ezra Klein and Will Wilkinson over whether government is capable of "madness." Klein says that health care protestors are driven by "distrust in the political system" and that they unreasonably "believe the government capable of madness." Wilkinson responds that the government commits acts of madness all the time, and points to the war in Iraq, torture, and rendition as obvious examples.

Not surprisingly, I'm inclined to say Wilkinson wins this round, and to think that Friedersdorf is exactly right when he goes on to remark as follows:

It is notable that the mainstream Republican position is that the President is a mysterious quasi-socialist who isn't to be trusted… except with sweeping executive powers to do pretty much anything he wants in foreign policy… whereas the mainstream Democratic position is that it's irrational to fear that the federal government will engage in obviously immoral practices… except for all the torture it committed and detainees it abused over the last 8 years.