A rationale for restricting government - please share

Government is an absolute necessity, but absolute government is necessarily evil.  

If perception is reality and no two people perceive things the same way, then what two different people need - in addition to the basic necessities of life - will necessarily be different.  Consequently, if government's purpose is to fill unfulfilled needs for the governed, in doing so government manifestly cannot fulfill different needs, arising from different perceptions and realities, in equal measure in each and every circumstance.  Government is therefore an imperfect vessel for social responsibility.  At best.

At it's worst, government can skew not only the delivery of the means to fulfill social and societal needs, but also it's own multi-faceted, compartmentalized, departmental understanding of what those needs even are.  If the government does not have an absolutely flawless perception of every individual and every circumstance, it cannot possibly fulfill every need equally. Moreover it  certainly cannot deliver for some without it being done at the expense of others.

Governments absolutely create an imbalance in what they deliver and in order to fund their fulfillment, also in what they take.  Governments are not creators of wealth, they are merely redistributors of it.  If they are flawed in their analysis, they are then also flawed in that redistribution.

But if governments are absolutely necessary to some degree, then what's to be done to ensure that society does not exist at the unbearable expense of an individual or vast swaths of individuals?

It seems that the further away from something we are, the less we understand of it.  That's common sense - we are not close to the stars of the universe so we are forced to infer things about them and build our knowledge of them.  But closer to home we have been able to explore Mars and understand it more than before we could touch the surface with explorer vehicles. And still closer to home we have yet to fully understand the oceans.  But we understand our farmland better than our understanding of oceans and likewise we understand oceans better than Mars and Mars better than stars in distant galaxies.

Using that logic, it makes sense that local government would be more understanding and knowledgeable of proximal problems than state governments, and they in turn more than federal governments and in turn again more than some United Nations panel.   Not only would proximal governors better understand a specific problem, that may differ than that in some other locality, they would consequently be able to better devise and assess potential solutions.  They would further be able to deliver a response in an infinitely more timely fashion.

Secondarily, if the problems were similar to those in other localities, there would be similar attempts to address the same issue, across these localities, likely with different outcomes. One of the greatest benefits of a non-homogeneous suite of ideas (forget non-homogeneous physical identifiers, that's a red herring),  is that with multiple attempts at solutions you immediately have improved your odds of finding a solution that can be extrapolated to those who have tried and failed with different approaches.  

If you are playing baseball and you only get one swing at a pitch, odds are you are going to miss.  If you have 50 swings, you probably are going to get at least one hit in there somewhere.  That one (or more) hit is an opportunity to learn.  So too are all the misses.  Non-homogeneity of ideas is what ensures success.  More specifically, non-homogeneity of ideas combined with multiple real-world attempts to enact them

This is why free market capitalism outperforms command economies every single time - individuals try and succeed or fail thousands of times where in a central command structure you get one shot, that's it.  Yes, if it fails you can try again, but what if it fails catastrophically?  You've put all your eggs in one basket and if it drops, eggs will break.  And even if it is not a catastrophic failure, you have wasted time and have to start over.  If it takes 3 or 4 tries to get it right you have spent three or four times as long to get to a solution that a free society has long since moved on to other problem-solving issues: you have fallen behind.

This is why central control is doomed to fail over time.  It cannot compete in the long run.  That is to say nothing of the fact that in order to prop itself up and mitigate the frustration and unrest resulting from its failures, it has to control speech, and ultimately, thinking. That further restricts ideas and ensures the implosion it someday faces.  This is how societies fail.  This is why communism, no matter when or where it has been tried or wherever it may be tried in the future, has always and will always fail.   The same is true for socialism.  These are varying degrees of fatal governments, the only difference being the speed of the death.

How do we avoid falling into that trap, when governments set the rules and therefore are subject only to their own regulation (assuming they even bother to comply with them)?  Society must devise a system where the government delegates as much power as possible to those outside of itself and keeps the minimal amount required to serve its base purpose. That means the states, municipalities, non-governmental institutions such as private companies and organizations like churches or charities, and ultimately, individuals are those who need to be empowered to act.  The United States Constitution was set out to do exactly that.  It's such a brilliant masterpiece of design.  Indeed, where its intent has been perverted is where we see unintended consequences and failures.  It's precisely where we see creeping avoidance of its imperatives and a resulting bloated state.  

Whether you believe America has a deep state or not, it is inarguable that it is a bloated behemoth of a beaurocracy bent on self-preservation at the expense of many (if not most) of those it was designed to serve. At it's core, individual liberty and the creative spark that alone enables are no longer it's primary purpose. The institutions of the American government, set out to foster individual liberty, are now being misused to specifically thwart that noble aim, and in the process are becoming like the dictatorial states America was designed to not become.  And sadly generations since the Baby Boomers have become increasingly enamored with a nostalgia for something that has never existed and cannot exist - a socialist Utopia.

I'm sure many of those who long for socialism simply do not understand what it is they seek and seek to replace.  Their ignorance does not excuse them from the inevitable harsh judgement of future generations forced to live under the yoke of a statist or globalist hegemony.  More importantly it does not excuse those of us in the know of not educating our brethren of the cliff they are hurling us towards unabated.  Upon us it is the most incumbent, not ironically at an individual level, to spread the word of individualism and liberty while we still can.  The failure to do so means the failed future of that liberty and free society will ours to own.