I dont know where exactly on the "batshit map of US political spectrum" I lie.
See, I hold the following (IMHO, sensible) opinions:
1) Regulation is necessary, since unrestrained capitalism enters "end stage", which results in global plutocracy. This is undesirable. It must be prevented from entering late-stage, in order to maintain any positive benefits of the use of the system by ordinary citizens. This means making the plutocrats, and would-be plutocrats sad pandas. Too damn bad.
2) Taxation needs to be sensible. I frequently see several arguments bantered about-- one is that taxation is not the primary source of federal income-- endless huge loans from the federal reserve bank (eg, printing more money) is. If this is the case, why does the fed bother to collect taxes at all in the first place? The second is that there is no real downside to hypertaxation. This is of course, equally silly. Taxation is clearly necessary (as per objection 1), but it must not become onerous (objection 2). To this end, government needs to actually budget, plan, and depreciate old agencies and directives in order to live within its means. This need not be a crippling austerity, like the EU handed down to Greece a few years back-- but it does need to realize that endlessly increasing the size of its budget, and adding more and more services (without depreciating and removing old services) is not how you manage things. Government should be much more concerned with the return on investment (Hey, we gave you money for a national fiber optic network-- ISPs, where's the damn fiber!? Give us what we paid for, or your entire boards will go to jail for fraud.), rather than on the intent of the investment (We tried to give you that infrastructure! HONEST!!), or government spending as a mechanism to spur economic activity (Holy PorkBarrel Batman!).
To those ends, I want the government to do what it is supposed to do; Be the arbiter of what is and is not allowable by law, and to be the enforcer for those laws.
Government is not doing its job when it fails to arbitrate the public good, and it is also not doing its job when it fails to enforce the laws already in place (or enforces them only selectively.)