Did you know that you can be sentenced to life imprisonment in the UK for suggesting that the monarchy should be abolished? [1] That's quite progressive, since it used to be the death penalty. Now in reality you probably won't be, but that law is an echo, still ongoing, of the sort of systems everybody used to live under. That directly leads to ideals of a smaller government. So I don't think these sort of values we're speaking of are abstract or moralistic in nature.
It's also not just in the past. We continue to live in the era of mass domestic surveillance, Patriot Act, Snowden leaks, regular oppression for political views (see: pro-Gaza protests), two tier legal systems, and much more. All the while governments with vast resources plunge sizable chunks, verging on a majority of discretionary spending, into militarism flirting with WW3 and the viable end of humanity it would entail. And I'm not even going to get into the insanity that's going on, worldwide - including the West, with the treatment of political candidates and elections. Suffice to say that's also enough to make a lot of people quite concerned.
So again all of this makes one begin to think 'perhaps governments shouldn't have this much power or wealth' at a point that I imagine you would say is, itself, already relatively low. I think that should all be fairly reasonable, even if one might disagree at some point. But I'm not entirely sure what the comparable evidence for the alternative is.
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/dec/13/calling-abol...
It's also not just in the past. We continue to live in the era of mass domestic surveillance, Patriot Act, Snowden leaks, regular oppression for political views (see: pro-Gaza protests), two tier legal systems, and much more. All the while governments with vast resources plunge sizable chunks, verging on a majority of discretionary spending, into militarism flirting with WW3 and the viable end of humanity it would entail. And I'm not even going to get into the insanity that's going on, worldwide - including the West, with the treatment of political candidates and elections. Suffice to say that's also enough to make a lot of people quite concerned.
So again all of this makes one begin to think 'perhaps governments shouldn't have this much power or wealth' at a point that I imagine you would say is, itself, already relatively low. I think that should all be fairly reasonable, even if one might disagree at some point. But I'm not entirely sure what the comparable evidence for the alternative is.
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/dec/13/calling-abol...