A classical liberal or a libertarian would be likely to agree in a limited government, that is a night watchman state.
The government’s job is to
1) Protect the people from foreign enemies
2) Protect the people from harming each other
3) Protect the people from government itself
To fulfill these functions the government defends the border, runs a court system and provides police protection.
Our rights are negative - life, liberty, property. The government does not guarantee you those things, but the government will work to prevent others from stealing it, defrauding you, attacking you, or killing you.
What is so offensive about this political position?
Unfortunately, memes grow by "reproducing" via spreading to more and more people. They adopt sub-memes, like planks in a political platform, that tell their followers they'll feel better about themselves if they do this or that particular thing. This gains them followers, who then shove the idea into law, which, coincidentally, also spreads the meme's effect because it can now use the power of physical coercion to get non-believers to behave in a certain way,
which is the meme's goal all along. It's about a mental worldview that may or may not have much bearing on reality, but goal, so to speak, is to get
your real-world behavior to help spread the meme.
So the long and the short of it is certain beliefs, attitudes, and
evolved ethical beliefs developed in meme mutations to try to gain more power, which is to say, spread by word or by force (once enough votes are achieved) human activity in the real world that supports the meme.
Religions adopted these care-for-everybody-and-everything attitudes, too, and for exactly the same reason -- competing memes, i.e. other religions, that didn't. lost followers because they didn't make their followers feel as good about themselves.
Very early non-Biblical descriptions of Christianity included noting, not negatively, how they care for the sick and poor, even at their own expense.
Note how political memes shoved religious off into a little corner, and slowly took over all the things religion did. Hospitals, care for sick, poor, and elderly. No matter how iron-clad the constitutional protections against growth of government were, it would crack eventually as ethical beliefs mutated, ratcheting up the importance of these things (strokes the populace) until they just flat-out asserted the power.
The proper course would have been to amend the Constitution to allow the government to do this. That would have happened eventually, but why wait, when you can just adopt a meme plank or two, and suddenly find what the Constitution means shifts
because public attitudes have shifted, and, far worse, the sidekick meme that
"and that's ok!"
Thus you don't have to wait a decade or two more. You can go do it right away under FDR!.
And don't say it's not an evolved ethic. Senator Byrd, one of the biggest senatorial wastes of money, got on the floor during the debate on the balanced budget amendment 15 years ago, and was furious
to the point of literal tears dripping down his face at the
horribleness of the amendment's requirement for a declared war
or a congressional supermajority to borrow more than you take in.
He despaired of it "thwarting the will of the people", said will being 50.00001% or more. This actually threatens the spread of his meme master, and hence the meme mutates to adopt ethical, i.e. emotional, beliefs about how ungodly important is the raw, raw "will of the people." Thus he eviscerates the rationale behind supermajorities, which in turn was designed
precisely to stop the winds of political change from making massive, permanent changes because some cute demagogue came along and briefly got his 50.00001%.
Supermajorities take time to build. Amendments take time to pass 3/4 the states to give people time to think about it beyond the whim of the moment. It's supposed to prevent demagoguery from asserting power due to transient outrage or overhyped concern.
So the meme that could
ethicalize the importance of that into oblivion clearly would have an advantage.
And does.
