Thomas Paine goes to great lengths in Common Sense to distinguish the difference between "society" and "government".
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a county without a government, our calamities are heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer."
"Liberty and limited government were not invented in 1776; the were reaffirmed and strengthened."
"The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem."Question: Your essay offers parallels between Brooklyn busybodies and Taliban oppressors. How does the nanny state resemble totalitarian theocracy?
Answer: Consider ice cream: Even a single scoop of vanilla was forbidden to women in pre-war Afghanistan, lest they become decadent and Western. In Brooklyn, moms try to force ice cream trucks out of parks, thus eliminating the temptation to consume fat and sugar. The magnitude of interference is different, but both are looking to the state to protect the people from their worst selves.
"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that, if it is comfort or money it values more, it will lose that too."
— William Somerset Maugham [1941]
