What I don't get is that in the face of the obvious fact that you're not going to get what you want any time soon, that Congress isn't going to reduce its powers or its spending by 90% any time soon or likely ever, you prefer a dysfunctional Congress above an at least somewhat more functional one. I'd get it if a dysfunctional Congress spent less money than a better-functioning one, but as we've seen recently, that really isn't the case.

From where I'm standing, it looks to me like you're saying, if Congress doesn't do things the way I want, then I don't care what they do or how big a mess they make of things, and I'm not interested in measures that may improve government, not unless they give me the minimalistic government I want.

And that just doesn't make much sense to me. That is what I called "absolutist".

Ah. Okay. That makes more sense now.

It's not as if Congress failing to function properly will somehow devolve more power to other institutions, though, at least not to a sufficiently big extent. You may not like that Congress has granted itself the power to deal with those issues, but that's what happened, and a non-functioning Congress doesn't mean those issues get dealt with by others, it just means those issues don't get dealt with at all, or get dealt with in inept and insufficient ways. The exacerbating budget deficit, the costs of Social Security and Medicare that will become unpayable in the future, these are not matters that the states can do much about, not even if you actually managed to devolve some power back to the states, which I don't see any indications of.

Er. Okay... I was under the impression that even you wanted a national government to take care of national defense if nothing else, and one would assume foreign policy and some other domains. Of course, it's unlikely that those things will really fail as such, but if the government does fall apart, they'll certainly suffer a great deal. One would assume that the individual states would suffer a great deal, as well.

As you can tell, the things that would happen if the government "falls apart" are not something I've given a lot of thought to, because I've never before encountered someone who thought that this was something to aspire to.

There is a large difference between having principles that one sticks to in one's personal life, and having rigid ideological notions that one insists on enshrining in government come hell or high water. Since a government per definition has to govern people of quite different views and to some extent different principles, I do oppose overly ideological government, yes. You've argued many times before that compromises over abortion don't make any moral sense, and you're quite right of course, but then, morality isn't exactly government's primary worry. Government's worry is merely to find solutions that are acceptable to as many people as possible, and that satisfy more quantifiable kinds of public interest - offering all kinds of services that the people needs, whether we are talking national military, law enforcement, fire departments, tax collection, education system, whatever, at a good quality-price ratio.