Another assumption:<p><pre><code>  our government == functioning democracy
</code></pre>
Our government&#x27;s apparent interests and the interests of the population are only loosely correlated in most instances and diametrically opposed to the interests of the population in way too many instances.  Consider: copyright and other IP laws, the current voting systems, the power of lobbyists, congressional insider trading, military contract approval, etc.<p>Additionally, the large majority of society&#x27;s interactions happen outside of any democratic vote.  The whole goal of the Constitution was to narrowly white list the functions of government so that the Civil Society could be left to operate as it saw fit thus maximizing individual liberty.<p>In general, not maintaining a clean separate abstractions for government and society is like having classes that try to have too many unrelated behaviors.  They lead to unneeded coupling of functions and an inability to reason cleanly about the whole system.