The Chairman at Maggie's Farm has some clarity on this question.

Boston College Political Science Prof. Alan Wolfe has written a piece, Why Conservatives Can't Govern. It is an over-heated, hyperbolic, and fact-twisting anti-Bush rant (for just one example, he makes it sound as if K Street were a Repub thing - it's not. K Street just follows the influence - they don't care who it is) rather than a calm, thoughtful essay, but he does have some good points. A quote:

If government is necessary, bad government, at least for conservatives, is inevitable, and conservatives have been exceptionally good at showing just how bad it can be. Hence the truth revealed by the Bush years: Bad government--indeed, bloated, inefficient, corrupt, and unfair government--is the only kind of conservative government there is. Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well.

Despite the partisanship and erroneous rhetoric, there is a point or two in this piece. What he omits is that the Liberals do no better - or worse.

(Clinton, and his abandoned wife, are, in my opinion, left-tilting, amoral pragmatists for whom power, money, and self-importance is the goal, not ideology. Both have more cojones than they have wisdom, and not only am I smarter than they are, but they couldn't run the businesses I run for five minutes. Truman, at least, ran a haberdashery.)

I do believe that if our Liberal Dems had full power, the US would be a train wreck like France. (I have yet to see the Liberal "world-class boeuf bourguignon." World-class things - like great restaurants - are produced in the private sector.) But I will not donate the time to refute every Lefty talking point in this piece - just see if you can find the good stuff in it.

Which is more foolish: Antagonism towards government, or faith in government? Answer: Both.

Phunny, as well as thoughtful! But I think his bottom line answer is mistaken. As Tim says:

. . . in the end, the thing that is both exceptional about the United States and potentially exportable or shareable with the world in a struggle against fundamentalism or oppression is not apple pie and chevrolets. It’s a basic insight about the nature of governmental (and possibly non-governmental) power: that power must be constrained to be productive, that the rights of individuals are not provisioned by the state but define the limits of state power.

Antagonism to government isn't foolish, it's necessary to the health of government. It's like exercise or something, a necessity to keep the body functioning well, but the physical reality of it is to destroy muscle tissue and damage skeletal material - which regenerates and improves. The analogy isn't perfect, I'm not sure how aging fits in. Over time exercise becomes less beneficial and in the end, it's the end. It's not clear that any government faces this in the same way.

Update:

Said another, better way:

Above all, a classical liberal needs to identify, expose, and counter the marketing strategies and tactics that are used to expand government. Both political parties play up fears in order to sucker us into ceding money and power. Just as certain citizens' groups are known for exposing the false advertising of corporations, we need to expose the false advertising of politicians.

I think this applies to more than classical liberals. Every society needs to be vigilant about the tendency of governments to get bloated and ineffective. Better government results.