There should be an active role for government to promote the general welfare- the founders knew this. Paleo-cons seem to hold the belief the anything executed by government in the name of promoted public virtue is doomed to fail. I believe this to be untrue. However many neo-con's (most notably President Bush) seem to believe that all public virtues can be implemented at the federal level- an THIS IS doomed to fail. Government does have a moral responsibility to care for it's most needy, to take care of its elderly and educate its young, its misfortunate and temporarily displaced- these needs to be done by government. But the question is how. What programs will best meet these ends? The failures of the Great Society, the New Deal and New Freedom initiatives taught us that all solutions can not be found at the federal level. That in many cases these programs- one size fits all programs- will do more harm than good; or the cost simply doesn't justify the benefit. Our democracy has done well changing with the times in the long term, addressing issues and redirecting our efforts at others. But I believe our system of government lends itself to a particular use of politics and unfortunately the evaluation of programs no matter who is in power is going to rarely happen in the ephemeral- things will have to good disastrously wrong before things are acted upon. For this reason paleo-con's are greatly hesitant to promote the use of government for anything other than defense- I find that too simplistic. We need to utilize government to serve the common good. But we also need to strike a balance between what can realistically be accomplished at what cost.