evidence: But then I had to tell them, these Democrats, about Jefferson’s ideas of minimal government, that he fervently believed that the best government was the one that governed least, that he disliked all Federal taxes, that he had no programs for the cities, that he, in fact, hated all cities and wanted America not to develop any. I also had to tell them that he hated the Supreme Court and was more of a strict constructionist than Robert Bork, that he feared all governmental power and often suggested that government was only a device by which the few attempt to rob, cheat, and oppress the many. [...] Jefferson’s assumption that people were naturally sociable and possessed an innate moral sense had important implications. It lay behind his belief in minimal government. He thought if the government would just get out of the way, people’s inherent sociability and moral instinct would create a natural ordering of the society, an ordering that would be free of the confusion and contentions of the past. Many revolutionaries, like Jefferson, believed that government, although perhaps necessary to restrict what wickedness that did exist, was, nevertheless, the source of most of the social evils in the world, including poverty and all invidious privileges and distinctions. With governmental power reduced to a minimum and vigilantly watched, revolutionaries like Jefferson hoped that the new Republican equality would lead to social harmony. They believed that the contentiousness of colonial politics under the British monarchy, for example, had come from the fact that undeserving people had been in leadership.