THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT – WITH WHOM DO YOU AGREE

Those who advocate for and believe in a controlling government
 
SOCIALISM IS government by the vast majority both through economic planning and management and through social development. Working class communities in the first instance would be involved in preventing sabotage and disruption of the new socialist society by any disaffected group in the former ruling class. Anti-social behavior would not die away overnight. 
 
This is not just a question of material conditions such as poverty, which we could begin to tackle immediately. It's also a matter of repairing and then preventing the psychological damage done by capitalism and the power relations and abuse it promotes. Increased equality will reduce much crime. An end to capitalism as a social system which, for example, has discriminated against and condoned the treatment of women as the property of men, will undermine crimes of violence such as rape and domestic violence.  Karl Marx
 
To Lenin, the provisional government was a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.” He advocated instead for direct rule by the workers and peasants in a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Accounting and control – that is the main thing needed to achieve the ’smooth working,’ the correct functioning of the first phase of communist society [socialism].
In every socialist revolution . . . the principal task of the proletariat, and of the poor peasants which it leads, is the positive or constructive work of setting up an extremely intricate and delicate system of new organizational relationships extending to the planned production and distribution of the goods required for the existence of tens of millions of people.  Vladimir Lenin
 
The liberal party is a party which believes that, as new conditions and problems arise beyond the power of men and women to meet as individuals, it becomes the duty of the government itself to find new remedies with which to meet them.  Franklin D. Roosevelt
 
"Unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all of our problems. Some of these same voices do their best to gum up the works. They'll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can't be trusted."  Comrade Obama
 
Those who advocated for and believed in a limited government
 
“Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.” Thomas Paine
 
“Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master.”  George Washington
 
“When all government ...in little as in great things... shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power; it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.”
“A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.”  Thomas Jefferson
 
“When our founders set about the onerous task of forming a nation, they knew they must also form a government.  While forming that government, they understood they were forming the single biggest threat to the freedoms they had just won.  Because of that truth, they limited the role and power of government in Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution.  They then reinforced their intent to have a government limited to these enumerated powers with the Tenth Amendment.”  Don Jans