I watched a Bill Maher video yesterday in which a conservative politician who clearly believed that cleanliness (and short hair) is next to godliness claimed to believe in "adaptation" but not a certain fish story when confronted by a historically unelectable Canadian politician about whether he believed in antibiotic resistance (in which the evolution of the resistance trait was greatly accelerated by careless overuse).
I actually cut the guy some slack. There's no reason why he can't logically believe in the special theory of evolution (local adaptation) without necessarily believing in the general theory of evolution (the ascent of complexity from primordial origins). To believe in one without the other requires a larger than average mental judgement in between. Unfortunately, he lamely fell back on invoking the missing link. Bzzzzt. Thanks for playing.
Clearly he hasn't checked in with the Out of Africa theory lately, which was speculative until we began to read DNA in the early 1980s with all the proficiency of a clever three year old. Right now we're at about year two of a ten year post-graduate program in speed reading for lifeforms with facet eyes. Things have changed. If there were any region of the globe over the past 10,000 years (or 100,000 years) where the genetic lineage of any species of quadruped (Noah being the patron saint of charismatic megafauna) is constricted to a single breeding pair, we'll surely find it soon on the rising flood of sequence data. Dude groomed for rapture should be worrying about the missing crink, not the missing link.
I can't say I have a higher opinion of "blame the government". It's like blaming calcium for arthritis, on the grounds that sans calcium, arthritis as we know it would no longer exist. The problem here is that calcium is just the implementation. The specification is to have a load bearing structure nimble enough to evade and pursue (aka biosecurity). A large branch of the solution space descends from elbows and kneecaps.
One of the major functions of a large population is agreeing on the threat enough to achieve cohesion in the threat response. This is mirrored in the organism by how the fight/flight response is balanced on a knife edge, and how the hormones that prime this metabolic state also tamps down immune response. Guess what, libertarians, that's a centralized response.
You can discard the implementation (government as we know it), but you can't discard the specification. Unfortunately, contrary to the most vociferous howls, the problems are actually rooted in the specification, not the implementation.
Just like replacing an aging software system, while it's absolutely certain that the worst points of friction in the existing system will go away, new points of friction are extremely likely to take their place, unless you stumble upon the "silver bullet" solution paradigm (social media won't let you down). I tend to be fairly reluctant to stick up my hand when a surgeon promises to cure my arthritic knee by lopping off my leg and grafting on a tentacle to replace it. I worry that might bring with it new problems every bit as annoying as the previous problem.
The present state of the NSA and the legislation around it is pretty much an unbroken story since the end of the first world war. (The Germans did not invent Enigma on a fall afternoon in 1939.) I vaguely recall reading in the The Puzzle Palace (or something similar from the same era) that before the U.S. government passes a law preventing secret agencies from spying on American citizens there was already a secret law on the books exempted a certain no such agency from being beholden to any such future law.
Democracy it turns out is a lot like the human immune system. It shuts down on a dime in the presence of an acute threat, as defined by the pulsed secretion of some small gland. Once you get to the place where the small gland sees a lion in every box of Cracker Jack, democracy is reduced to vestigial status, until we're all killed by a disease transmitted by infected telephones. Then the cycle repeats. The general theory of evolution seems to iterate on foolish overreaching. Perhaps evolving toward complexity is a hard problem where nothing useful is achieved by linear enlightenment.
This engineering problem of how to achieve group consensus on when to shut down group consensus remains to be solved. Software engineers who delight in replacing old cruft (whose pains are self evident) with new cruft (whose pains can be only be imagined) need not apply. Dweeb-thought: If only we replaced Oracle with MySQL, life would all be good. Deep-thought: Mutex-free distributed integrity is a hard problem.
Politically, well over 90% of the negativity toward government I see expressed on the intertubes falls into the dweeb-thought bucket.