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It's a week or more old, but not for the first time Shuggy puts his case very well:

the demand for limited government has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with a belief in the essential goodness of human nature. No - all human beings can be, and often are, selfish, destructive, venal, vicious, stupid and desperately wicked. Rather, it is based on an insistence that the political class are made from the same human material.

This version of liberty expresses equality at its very foundation - and grasping this is a matter of no small importance. The failure to understand it leads to one of two extremes: the 'libertarian' imagines a political class occupied by people whose essential nature is more disfigured than the rest of us, whereas those who advocate deference of an uncritical nature to those in authority impute angelic virtues to our rulers. But the insistence on limited government has nothing to do with either of these