It’s more complicated – they want order AND law; and especially want a better amount of justice. There’s a LOT of corruption possible in most democracies, including America, Israel, Germany, Japan, the EU, and all ex-commie countries.

“Liberals”, including classical liberals who support liberty, have been really bad at stopping gov’t corruption. Few things are so enraging as injustice combined with getting much richer thru unfair or illegal acts, with the gov’t more supporting those who are corrupt over those who are not.

Harry Potter, and so many other books, include a big dose of injustice to literally justify violence. And if injustice justifies violence, while gov’t is the socially acceptable “violent” group, it naturally follows that all who want to stop injustice want a gov’t strong enough to do that.

Having proportional voting, with multiple parties, probably leads towards more corruption, as well, tho I’m speculating on this.

Going to the IHS website linked to, we read that they separate themselves from all others by their “vision of the good society: a tolerant and pluralistic society in which intellectual and economic progress are the norm, and where individuals and communities flourish in a context of openness, voluntary and peaceful cooperation, and mutual respect.” The notion that this somehow separates them from others is a powerful testament to their fundamental insincerity. Everyone shares this utopian vision. Claiming it as your own is disrespectful of others who disagree with you.

The must-read blog of Ann Althouse frequently comments insightfully on this little game of superiority in discourse.

But that’s not what people believe or mean when they say they don’t trust the government, and they see government successfully imposing its will on other people and on themselves all the time.

You can, for example, think the government tells a lot of lies all the time, and still believe that it will successfully and ruthlessly prosecute a business into oblivion for being illegally unwoke.

But to me this undermines the ‘state capacity’ critique of libertarianism. All the evidence we’re seeing suggests to me that the likes of Tyler Cowen should be ailing their criticism in the opposite direction: rather than trying to convince libertarians to embrace larger government, he should be trying to convince progressives (or populists) to stop trying to make government bigger, and focus instead on making it more efficient with the resources it has. Fix the leaks first before pouring more in. If anything I think the threat of budget cuts may be the best way to motivate bureaucracies to do a better job in order to stay off the chopping block. I think making government better at what it does is at most orthogonal to its size, and may even dovetail with aspirations for smaller government than bigger government.

Of course, if I were a cynic prime to conspiracy theories, I’d speculate that those who make the “we have to make it bigger in order to make it work better” argument are mainly concerned about getting a bigger government, not a more efficient one, and they suspect that if we reformed government and made it more efficient at the current (or smaller) size first, then people would see less of a need to enlarge, and would be satisfied to leave it as it is.