One day I was listening to the Nightside Project on KSL. One of the hosts (the juvenile one) juxtaposed quotes made by two separate politicians.

One, a Utah State legislator, had recently been appointed to working in a public transit committee and had recently proclaimed his new love for the job.

The other was, at the time, the Republican party candidate for the US Senate.

The latter was quoted saying that transportation is not the "proper role of government." The former, though once critical of public transit as "socialist," was quite pleased with the new work that his fellow legislators had entrusted to him.

The host then said (I paraphrase): "which of these two is the more conservative? They both claim to be conservative but they can't both be equally conservative with these diametrically opposed statements."

At the time, I was still clinging bitterly to my Statism and adoration for the Constitution of the United States. Naturally, it annoyed the snot out of me.

Why was it so hard for people to understand that Utahns, like all Americans, fell under the jurisdictions of two separate "governments" concurrently and that they were responsible for two totally separate jobs?

Sometimes people in other countries think of Americans as ignoramuses. We have no clue how foreign cultures and people think, live, or work. While this is true, what those same critics of our society don't know is that we're equally as ignorant of how our own culture and society works.

Hardly any of us actually know that the Constitution of the United States established a federal government by contract among sovereign entities (in the way that Belgium or Germany are -- or at least have been in the recent past -- sovereign) and that the jurisdiction of this Federal power is geographically broad but its responsibilities narrow where the jurisdictions of the states covered less land but far broader responsibilities.

At least that's how it worked before the civil war. Today, we use the term "state" anachronistically where the term "province" is probably more appropriate. The term "Union," while perhaps still descriptive, is less so than the word "Empire."

Some of this concept still lingers in our modern empire and that's why a candidate for federal office can claim that transit is not "the government's role" while another of the same party but in a different level of government can say that buses are the coolest thing evar!

One of the reasons it was hard for this particular radio host to understand this principle is because he's a moron. But the other reason it's hard for him, like most people, to understand is because we use the same word to refer to both of these divisions of governing power.

We say "government" for the general empire as well as any of its fifty subsidiaries. This confusion does little to help us reach a consensus about what the "proper role of government" actually is. Somebody from New York sees their province-state do a lot more than somebody from North Dakota does. People from each are comfortable with the way their lives work so when a person from either culture says "government should or should not do X," they could mean "the feds should or should not do something" simply because their own province does or does not do it.

So when people can't distinguish their provinces from the Federal Power, that makes it even more confusing when somebody from New York interacts with somebody from North Dakota where the provincial powers are exercised very differently yet still referred to with the same terms.

For this reason, I have grown to use the term "government" only as a verb. e.g. "Tutankhamen's government of Egypt was marked by profound cruelty to Nubians." Just about any other use is too confusing. Even then, the word has a broad meaning --- almost to the point of meaningless --- so I still discourage its use.

Because it's easy to accidentally use the term ambiguously, we should all do our best to avoid it. Having anything in common with a radio pundit is bad.