The conflict we have over welfare, religion, abortion and whether marriage should be legally redefined unfortunately results from the adoption of a false premise.

The idea that forces our judges to debate issues that they are unqualified to address, and to create laws and rights that no honest person can find in our nation's founding documents, results from the same false assumption.

This assumption makes it possible for leaders to engage in incredibly shallow logic, as demonstrated last week on "60 Minutes." Lesley Stahl says to Barney Frank, D.-Mass., "Then you're talking about welfare."

Frank replies, "Yeah. I'm for welfare. You're not? Are you for letting people starve?"

Government is not society. Ironically, this becomes increasingly true as the size of the government in question increases.

Thomas Paine recognized this more than 230 years ago. Society is produced by our wants and needs, but a need for government is created by our failures. Governments are necessary, but Paine wrote, "Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."

Government is justified in protecting the natural rights of all people equally and is only legitimate if it is established by an agreement between all members of society. It is society that creates a government as an instrument of its will, not the other way around. Natural rights do not originate in the government, nor does the government have any rights to alter them except to restrain violence.

Paine stated, "The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman and every occupation prospers by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole. Common interest regulates their concerns, and forms their laws; and the laws which common usage ordains, have a greater influence than the laws of government. In fine, society performs for itself almost everything that is ascribed to government."

We are so far removed from these principles that the possibility of their re-implementation is actually frightening to most modern Americans.

Like Frank, they make the assumption that without government intervention we will all symbolically starve.

This is simply untrue, and when government attempts to become society, conflicts arise that can eventually destroy a country.

Take marriage as an example. The government is not the source of marriage. Nor should it have any role in defining what it is. Marriage is an arrangement between consenting people and their families. It is blessed by your religion and recorded by your government.

If your religion does not want to bless it, so be it. If your government does not want to record it, so be it. This does not mean that the marriage is invalid. That a person could be arrested for a marriage approved by consenting adults and their families within an accepting society is obscene.

The government has no place within the society of a family, except to prevent violence when requested.

Even the vilest tyrants in the past did not extend their power into a home unless the power of the tyrant was directly threatened.

But who would protect us?

This is the question asked by slaves and children.

A government is no better than the society that creates it. The idea that a government can enforce morals not generally held by society, is specious.

The same argument applies to almost all the divisive issues of our time, including abortion. These "hot button" issues are hot only because we have forgotten the proper role of government.

This is not anarchy. Thomas Paine argues that it is government that creates "riots and tumults," not the absence of governments. He affirms that it is through the associations which we freely form, in which "government is totally out of the question, and in which they act merely on the principles of society" is how we see how various parties freely unite.

As demonstrated by last week's news when a state governor has been charges with trying to sell the senate seat of Barack Obama to the highest bidder, government does not attract the best and most worthy of society. It attracts sharks, cons, criminals and busybodies.

As Paine stated, "The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind."

Government is not society, and attempts to make it so can only bring tyranny and discord.