First of all, even the constitution recognizes that the point of government is to protect the rights and liberties of the people.
First of all, the Constitution starts with a capital letter C. The Constitution protects the rights and liberties of the people by enumerating and giving them legal status. Citizens protect those rights. Governments on the other hand legislate your rights away in return for social securities. Your hand is extended for the entitlements, so your not retaking liberties back from anyone. Take your social cause wristband and write entitlements=slavery on it. As an alternative you could write my liberty is protected by me, not the government.
This is a common problem in Western societies. For some reason people see their constitutions/charters/what have you and their citizenry as separate entities from the government. It's telling that a citizen is a citizen until he becomes a senator, congressman, president, businessman, etc. Once they have some measure of power they are no longer a citizen, but part of the "them" crowd.
It would be interesting to see when this shift took place. American skepticism of government was not designed to make a completely unworkable government, nor do people realize that as population growth and urbanization occurs, its natural that the size of the faculties, facilities and institutional members would grow. That doesn't mean GOVERNMENT is expanding, it should be proportional. That doesn't mean it's not either, but there's no direct correlation between the government building more buildings/hiring more people and actual intrusiveness into your rights.
Similarly, the Constitution is part of our government, hell, its the BACKBONE of our government. It lists negative and positive freedoms, and it restrains certain actions in an effort to benefit the entire nation.
As I said before, I don't care if we have small government, or big government, as long as its EFFICIENT government. That's what should matter, and neither a remarkably small government nor will a large government suffice.
Lao Tzu says the best type of leader is one in which the people are barely aware, next is one who is kind and compassionate, next is one who is feared, and finally one who is detested and disobeyed.
The idea of democracy is to reach a government that embodies the first type of leadership, one in which the people are hardly aware of it. Failing to do this, we should aim to be just and compassionate until we can reach a state in which government is not needed.
We are not at that point as a race, it's just not possible to have no government. Similarly, we have evolved past the point where totalitarian control is possible as well. As I said, our goals now SHOULD be to work towards a less involved, but MORE efficient governing system, but if we stay mired in this nonsensical ideological bickering on our domestic political stage, nothing will progress.