SJ, I agree with quite alot of what you've said. In my younger days I was a political anarchist. I grew out of it because I inreasingly realised that alot of the arguments I was hearing from my peers were complete tripe. I'm not sure it's the same elsewhere but here the anarchist movement has become tied up with a "levelling" paradigm. The anarchists here believe that the removal of controls and laws will somehow result in large corproations losing out to little corner shops and a generally fairer society. I find that view to be completely flawed and, while I do think a certain amount of levelling would be a good thing, I suspect it's more likely to be brought about by more legislation rather than less.

None the less, I do still value personal freedom and responsibility (which is really where the anarchist movement started) and I do believe that governments have a general tendancy to subsume those principles. The reason why is obvious really: governmenets want to be seen to be actively doing good. "We're not going to do anything" is a pretty hard political sell.

Where I'd disagree with you is that I think you're being too simplistic. It's all very well to say government should not be involved in our personal lives but there's a rather obvious need for them to be there. To take a rather flippant example, making poedaphilia illegal is an infringement of my personal freedom by the governement but it's certainly not one any of us would object to. That's a silly example, of course, but does serve to illustrate a point: Governments do have a role to play in dictating what we can or can't do. The debate, really, is about how big a part you believe they should have and in what areas? At the moment you're mostly just making firebrand statements that don't explore where those lie for you, which means your really just engaging in the same over-simplified hyperbole you were previously railing at the media for and which your accusing the public of being ignorant for focusing on.