I think there is a big difference. As ubiquitous and powerful as Google is, the US government is vastly more powerful, and I think it's vastly more dangerous without accountability.
Well, perhaps more dangerous in theory. In practice, the biggest role the federal government has played in US history is that of liberating people from the tyranny of private businesses: first with slavery, then Teddy Roosevelt vs. the robber barons, the Civil Rights Acts (that prohibited private businesses from discriminating based on race), and most recently the (unfortunately not-so-successful) fight against private health insurance companies. In fact, given its limited powers (relative to other Western democracies), that's pretty much the only thing the US government does: businesses hurt people; people cry for the government to save them; government saves them. What they've been trying to do with terrorists over the past decade or so is small potatoes.
The obviously relevant US government (since it's the one that ended slavery, fought the robber barons, passed the Civil Rights Act, recently passed health insurance reform, and has limited powers compared to other western democracies) imprisons 216,896 people[0], or less than 0.07% of the US population.
State governments are not "the US government". If someone says "the US government", they are either referring to the federal government, or need to do a great deal more research before speaking about US governance.
The Drug War was started at a Federal level, with the Controlled Substances Act and the creation of the DEA (US Drug Enforcement Agency). [1] Approximately 1 in 10 Americans have been arrested on drug related charges since then, and even just looking at Federal prison facilities, 0.5 million people are incarcerated every year. [2]
And that's just drug policy. Abuses by Federal agencies are numerous across history into the present day, and have often taken place on a grand scale:
Right. Still, I find it strange that almost all attacks on personal freedom in America have been done by private businesses (or in the name of private business), and almost all defenses against such attacks have been placed by the US federal government, and yet some Americans still trust private corporations -- that have hurt them again and again -- more than the government that has rescued them from the clutches of corporations time after time. If there is one country in the whole world that should definitely trust its government more than its corporations, that would be the US.
Might have something to do with incarceration rates in united states and ridiculously high sentences/consequences for essentially small offences. If something qualify as attack on personal freedom, those two things do. Corporation can not lock you to prison for some petty offense, unless it has cooperation from government.
I'm a big proponent of government and a healthy mix of public and private enterprise. My point is mostly that I'm worried more about safeguards against a corrupt referee than a corrupt star player, to use a sports analogy.
> that's pretty much the only thing the US government does
Besides waging bloody, unnecessary war (War of 1812, Mexican War, Spanish American War, Vietnam War, Iraq War); instituting explicitly racist immigrating policies; waging a disastrous War on Drugs at home and abroad; instituting protectionist trade policies on behalf of rent-seeking corporations and unions; busting unions; interning thousands of innocent Japanese Americans; the mass expropriation from and relocation of thousands of Native Americans; and hundreds of less memorable abuses, not to mention its complicity with several of the ills you mentioned, yeah, sure, "pretty much the only thing" the US government has done has been protecting us from "the tyranny of private businesses".
I like how we're evaluating the USG of 2014 on the War of 1812, among other things.
I was involved in planning for a 200-year commemoration of the War of 1812. We invited the U.K. and Canada, amongst other nations, and they were glad to send representatives to the commemoration, despite the fact that the U.S. was at war with those 2 nations in 1812.
I was talking about domestic policy, which is the issue here. There is no doubt that the US government has done a lot of wrong, only much -- if not most -- of it has been done in the name of business. So your defense of Google (as a representative of private business) over the government, is that the government does a lot of bad when it's fighting on Google's side, and that it's not fighting against Google enough? Of course the government fights alongside capitalists most of the time, but the capitalists can do the same harm on their own (which they did when there was little government to stop them). The difference between American corporations and the American government, is that sometimes, when things get bad enough, the government turns against businesses, while the businesses themselves almost never do.
