1. We’re here to protect your rights

As many Americans have learned recently, there’s an epidemic of police brutality in America. With the help of the federal government, America police departments have been militarized, and too often they treat citizens like an enemy to defeat instead of a population to protect.

As Senator Rand Paul wrote:

When you couple this militarization of law enforcement with an erosion of civil liberties and due process that allows the police to become judge and jury—national security letters, no-knock searches, broad general warrants, pre-conviction forfeiture—we begin to have a very serious problem on our hands.

Police brutality is a systemic problem—84 percent of cops say they’ve seen it happen—and it unfairly targets minorities. Protecting our rights, this is not.

2. Your stuff is yours to keep

Did you know the Supreme Court has ruled it’s legal for the government to take your house and give it to a business so they can use the land instead?

Well, it did.

While most people will thankfully never be subjected to this gross abuse of private property rights, the government could still legally take your stuff through civil asset forfeiture.

Never heard of it? Most haven’t.

As I noted a few weeks ago, civil asset forfeiture is basically a law that allows a police officer who finds you “suspicious” to just take your stuff. Once your property has been confiscated, the burden of proof is on you, not the police, to show that you didn’t get it from any criminal activity. You have no right to a lawyer and won’t get a day in court.

Civil asset forfeiture happens a lot, because police conveniently consider large amounts of cash very suspicious indeed—but not too suspicious to dump it right into their own department coffers.

3. You can trust us with your future

More than half of Millennials believe we’ll never get any of the money we’re forced to pay into Social Security—and we’re right:

The management of entitlement programs, already weighted heavily in favor of the older population, has a very specific terminal point that coincides neatly with the Boomers’ deaths. The 2011 report by the Social Security trustees estimates that, under its current administration, the fund will run out in 2036, so there’s just enough to get the oldest Boomers to age ninety.

For Millennials, there’s nothing secure about Social Security. So when do we get to opt out and be responsible for our own futures?

4. You can trust us with your money

If it wasn’t already obvious that, “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys,” $17 trillion of national debt makes it inescapably clear. This debt has piled up because Washington has a bipartisan addiction to spending money and isn’t willing to go to rehab.

Here’s essentially what happens every few years:

Right: We’re about to hit the debt ceiling again! We really need to get spending under control.
Left: I agree. Let’s protect our children’s future. So, what should we cut?
Right: Definitely not war stuff. We should find some extra cash in those welfare programs.
Left: Well, there’s no way I’m signing anything that attacks entitlements.
Right: Ok, so let’s increase spending on all our favorite things, but we’ll increase it slightly less than we originally planned.
Left: Perfect! This is a historic, bipartisan cut. Congratulations to us!

So they raise or suspend the debt ceiling, spend another couple trillion, and we’re back in the same place 18 months later. As vicious cycles go, this one has few rivals.

5. No, really, you can trust us with your money

The value of the American dollar has steadily dropped for a century. Why? The Federal Reserve.

See, whenever you create huge quantities of money based on nothing, this results in devaluation, or inflation, of the currency. To see this effect writ large, just take a look at the history of our money’s value over the course of the last 100 years thanks to the Fed’s print-happy ways. The worth of the dollar has declined to less than five cents of what it was at the beginning of the 20th Century—not exactly a strong case for continuing to trust the government with this responsibility.

6. You can trust us

President Obama made headlines last summer when he urged young Americans to trust their government:

Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.

And while he’s right that government isn’t the root of all our problems, it’s not trustworthy, either. As Thomas Jefferson wrote to Abigail Adams, “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.”

Jefferson is still right today: Not every distrust of government will be accurate. There will always be crazy conspiracy theories and people who see bugbears around every corner.

But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater, because it’s a really important baby. In fact, it’s a quintessentially American baby; and to the extent that we have a national identity, this is it: There’s a real sense in which we don’t trust the government, and we don’t want to, and we never will.

And given how many lies our government has told us, that is a very good thing.