The Sage of Baltimore Understood Government Perfectly

Government' consists of a gang, with no particular talent for the business of government, nor anything else for that matter. They do have talent, and lust, only for getting and holding political office.  Their principal device to that end is to seek out constituencies of weaklings who endlessly pant  and pine for something they can't quite seem to get, mainly because they're not  willing to work for it.

These constituencies are then promised, that what they think they want will be forcibly taken from those who rightfully own it and subsequently given to  them, even though they neither deserve it, nor have so much as lifted a finger  to earn it.  The process is little more than 'theft by proxy.'  The actual thieves are, as noted above, contemptible gasbags.  Recipients, when  they go along, become petty thieves themselves, are thus altogether stripped of  what little personal honor and dignity they may have once had.

Happily, nine times out of ten, those promises, like the prevaricators who make them, are worth nothing. The tenth time is made good only by looting the  productive in order to mollify the willfully unproductive.  In other words,  our 'government' is a broker in pillage, and every so-called 'election' is  little more than an auction of pilfered goods.

. . . Henry L. Mencken