Usually, if you don't give the government some power, that power is just taken by the strongest or least scrupulous. If you want to reduce the government's power to tell industry what they can and can't do, you just increase industry's power to control your life or pollute your environment. If that other party gets powerful enough through this method, then they eventually earn the title of "the government" -- so of course governments are the sources of atrocities! The word just means "whoever has the most power". Yes. Atrocities are committed by the powerful against the weak. Of course!
The trick is to stop treating "the government" as some monolithic "other", and work to make the government part of us; made out of the same cloth as everyone else. If you don't like what the government is doing, then get more active in government. Any barriers to everyday citizens becoming active in government should be torn down as much as possible. Then giving the government power is the same as giving everyone power.
This is what libertarians and anarchists never seem to understand (or intentionally ignore). There's no such thing as "limited government" if you think of "the government" as a collection of entities that have power over your life. If you're lucky, you can have some influence on the makeup of those entities: mega-corporations, billionaires, tribal warlords, 70-year-old white supremacists, crime bosses, religious chosen-ones, feudal lords, or us. Let's work hard to skew it toward being us as much as we can, and stop pretending that if we take power out of the hands of one entity that we call "the government", then that power just goes away and nobody else exercises it.
The takings clause of the Fifth Amendment is an example of "limited government." It constrains what the government can do and it can't be overridden by a simple majority because it's part of the constitution.
The existence of that constraint on government power does not imply a power vacuum. If the government can't take your property without due process, that doesn't imply that a corporation can, because the restriction on government takings doesn't prevent the government from passing and enforcing laws against property theft by others. They're two separate things.
We could, and should, make civil asset forfeiture unconstitutional. Arguably it already is and the right case just hasn't made it to the Supreme Court yet. That's an example of a constraint on government power and it's a good thing.
I know we're not supposed to mention downvotes here but I really am genuinely interested in how someone could disagree with this argument. I genuinely want to hear what you have to say, downvoter. Please tell me which part of this you disagree with.
The trick is to stop treating "the government" as some monolithic "other", and work to make the government part of us; made out of the same cloth as everyone else. If you don't like what the government is doing, then get more active in government. Any barriers to everyday citizens becoming active in government should be torn down as much as possible. Then giving the government power is the same as giving everyone power.
This is what libertarians and anarchists never seem to understand (or intentionally ignore). There's no such thing as "limited government" if you think of "the government" as a collection of entities that have power over your life. If you're lucky, you can have some influence on the makeup of those entities: mega-corporations, billionaires, tribal warlords, 70-year-old white supremacists, crime bosses, religious chosen-ones, feudal lords, or us. Let's work hard to skew it toward being us as much as we can, and stop pretending that if we take power out of the hands of one entity that we call "the government", then that power just goes away and nobody else exercises it.