Government is the enemy and not your friend. The purpose of government is to control and to enslave the little people. More government does not solve anything, it just makes more government that you and I have to pay for.
I would rather a church or some non-profit like the united way or the red cross or the salvation army help people. The reason is that these people at least help people. They only ask for donations, they don't force you to donate or hold you hostage or steal your house if you cant pay. They also don't make your currency worthless or raise prices at the gocery store.
A Church teaches people to have hope and pray to god for strength; however, a government teaches people to have despair and turns them into slaves of the government.
Piasabird, you have basic misunderstandings of power, government, and oppression.
So let's toss out the usual words that keep you from understanding the issue, and discuss some basics.
Isn't the issue basically, how 'free' is the 'average person' - free in terms of how he's constrained by law, by force, by enslavement, by poverty, and such?
Human history tends to be filled with oligarchy - a few rich and powerful, and everyone else serving them, by producing food and wealth, serving in the military, and so on.
Even the greatest people not among those few served them - Da Vinci, Mozart, Shakespeare, these people had 'sponors' basically who chose to fund their activities.
So let's take a few examples of your freedoms being infringed from modern history.
The largest communist powers are cited for good reason as restricting freedom - there wasn't exactly 'free speech'. Fascism didn't give a lot of freedom to people, as it glorified the state and demanded the individual serve it. Poverty has great restrictions on freedom - whether among the poor in the US or the far poorer countries in the world. In 1900, the average wage in the US was $10,000 adjusted for inflation, the right for unions to try to raise wages illegal - that was less free for most.
So how does democracy fit into this? When our country was founded, as was the norm, wealth and power went together - the English nobility had the wealth and the power.
Democracy was a radical idea - it technically had some roots in ancient Greece and had pretty much been forgotten since - when it was reborn as the idea of empowering the 'average person', rather than simply having that system where the few in nobility rule, and that's that.
Democracy said that the right way for government to work is for government to have *the consent of the governed* - radical stuff contrasted with how things worked.
The way it spread the new 'redistribution' of power was not by making everyone equally wealthy - but by introducing a new currency, the 'vote', of which the poor man and rich man each received one. It was an artificial distribution of power to take power away from the extremely concentrated wealth, and spread it out evenly. Its whole purpose was to reduce the power of 'the few' and to make the average person 'in charge' of the government and society - increasing his freedom.
(Of course, 'the vote' had existed in the growing role of parliament in England for centuries, but not like this.)
One thing to note historically is that extremes of wealth did not exist when the US was formed. Washington was at the top of American wealth with his nice home in Mount Vernon and some slaves. It was a time when 'that guy having more than you' didn't really put him at odds with you that much, you could be on the same side of policies. There was almost no such thing as big corporations. That's in contrast to today, where now a thousand Americans are expected to outspend the rest of the country combined in election spending.
So, Democracy was created to form a government that was very much an instrument of the freedom of citizens, far more than had existed, with their consent.
And in that sense, you have it exactly wrong when you say its purpose it to oppress.
But. There's a big but. Well, two of them.
The first is the 'what about the anarchist/libertarian/tea party get rid of government' idea?
That is basically a naïve and dangerous notion that leads to the loss of power by the people as surely as it did for the communist states created to get rid of government. Oops.
I won't get into the argument about it here - it's time consuming and basically no one who has those views has had the ability to change them that I've seen, but I'll state my view.
The second is the more interesting and relevant issue - about the conflict between concentrated wealth and democracy. Just because the constitution bans titles, and We don't have 'Count Bill Gates' and 'Duke David Koch', doesn't mean that money doesn't really still give a lot of political power - and that is an ongoing battle for our country's history. And embarrassingly, it's a war that has normally gone a lot better than it is now.
Yes, we have a sordid history of the US Senate being 'the millionare's club' when it was appointed - but when it needs tens of millions of dollars to win a Senate race, and there is a massive amount spent on a propaganda machine that corrupts public opinion fundamentally so that the 'people's choice' becomes people like Ted Cruz, and the recent systemic changes we've made to take away the people's right to limit money in elections, we're at a low point.
And this is not the issue of government being bad, or for oppression - it's the issue of when democracy is corrupted by the same money that once represented the elite of England's few powerful, being allowed to take real democracy away from the people of the United States, to let those same few wealthy people have the power they are support to lose to democracy.
A Supreme Court Justice once said, you can have democracy, or you can have a large concentration of wealth, but you cannot have both.
And he was right. There are fundamental conflicts between the 'class interests' of great fortunes and the egalitarian, populist ideals of 'people power' with democracy, and great fortunes can be expected to use those fortunes, usually, in their own interest, which means at the expense of the people's power. There are exceptions by some principled and wealthy people, but overall, there is that conflict.
So you're wrong to simply attack 'government'. Government has done incredible things good for the people - largely but not entirely along the lines of equality - gender, race, sexual orientation and more - and it's an insidious bit of propaganda that the wealthy few who want to take the people's power away use, to try to get the people to simply 'hate government' as if government is the enemy rather than those very wealth and powerful few. They know who their enemy is - the enemy for them is democracy, and the people.
But they can trick some - like you - into surrendering the only chance you have for more freedom, through the power of a functioning democracy.
It may not look like it sometimes, when you see the democratic process corrupted, and the elected government do oppressive things - even the Supreme Court as it's now corrupted with five radicals who are re-writing our constitution to fit their ideology. But you should learn to appreciate the good government does, and how it can do even better when it's really representing the people, not bought by the wealthy (and elected by those voters who misguidedly support their agenda, such as the 'tea party'.)
Of course, there are issues in any society which pit one group against another, in which they claim their 'freedoms are infringed', even in a legitimate democracy. The slaves' rights were pitted against the rights of the majority of southerners who wanted to preserve the slavery system. The black person's rights to eat at a lunch counter was pitted against the restaurant owner's right to choose who to serve. Taxing all homeowners to pay for public education has been called less freedom for the childless homeowner who doesn't want to pay it.
But none of this changes that the system of democracy as a basic system for redistributing power to the citizens artificially is far superior to not having it, where the power is simply held by a few and the people have few if any rights, the return to oligarchy. But that's the way things are headed, as inequality is greatly increasing, and while you technically can vote for you want to, money is more and more controlling who can really get elected.
But 'government' is not the villain. That's a false and simplistic statement - even if government sometimes is a villain.
Government also directs that society's resources are largely used to serve the needs and desires of the people - from ensuring food safety to exploring space.
And it's more important than ever. In ancient Rome, the emperors paid for large public entertainment largely out of self preservation - if the public turned on them, as absolute as their power was in theory, they were quite vulnerable. That's no longer the case. With modern military, intelligence, security, there can never again be a use of force by the people to overthrow the US government - and so it's even more in our interest to ensure that the democracy that keeps that government serving the people is protected from corruption - and we've been doing the opposite. This is the source of the hostility to government by most - and a threat to the very democracy the people need for protection from the powerful.
These servants of the billionares in the tea party love to chant slogans about 'freedom' and liberty', but there's a perversity to how they're corrupting those words. They're not a new populism - they're a new attack by the same old forces of wealth to gain political power and subvert real democracy, by corrupting our system.
If you want enemy, do not look at government, look at the enemies of democracy, those who want to use the force of great wealth to undermine democracy - in ways such as, for one example, the role of ALEC in turning corporate wealth into the laws passed by our elected leaders for the benefit of corporate interest at the expense of citizens.
In this sense, someone having more is no longer harmless as it was with Washington - now, it's the Kochs taking over states, it's wealthy individuals changing the government of their states. All in order to take the power of the people away from them, and to ultimately reduce the freedom of most, leaving the freedom of the few seen in oligarchy.
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