The second and less obvious way in which limiting government strengthens government is through the elusive and irreplaceable commodity of trust. Like true love and home-grown tomatoes, trust in political institutions cannot be bought or manufactured. It is organic and fragile. The staff of the NSA could be composed exclusively of patriots with IQs of 185 and the dispositions of saints, but still they would be members of the same government as Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Lois Lerner, Susan Rice, Eric Holder, and Charles Rangel. The federal government is not in practice really a unitary thing, having as it does fissures and competing factions, but from the citizen’s point of view, it appears effectively monolithic. It is perfectly rational for an American citizen to doubt the NSA’s probity in exercising its investigatory powers when that same citizen knows what the IRS has done with its investigatory powers. It is perfectly rational for an American citizen to consider the national debt and doubt Congress’s power to conduct intelligent oversight of anything more complicated than one of the smaller Crayola sets (meaning the eight-crayon box, not the 120). And it may be perfectly legal and constitutional — whatever we’re pretending those words mean today — for the Obama administration to assassinate American citizens, but it is also perfectly rational for those actions to cause American citizens to distrust their government.