Deficits-Moral and Monetary

Like most people, I have been taking a lot of interest in the budgets of the worlds nations over the last few months. This week Greece nearly went bankrupt, and seems to still be in a world of financial trouble--even talking about asking the IMF to help it solve it's debt problems, and the Congressional Budget Office stated that by 2020 the United States national debt will breach 20 trillion (with a "T") dollars. As if these problems weren't enough, the EU faces even more countries with impending debt crises. Besides the fact it seems oddly like our world leaders are in desperate need in lessons in economics and budgeting, there is another, deeper problem that i think our impending debt crisis shows.
As a people, we have gotten used to living beyond our means. it amazes me that in greece, where the country was on track to go completely bankrupt by the end of this year, people could be protesting because the government was cutting programs, not because the government failed to create a viable budget in the past ten years--the former was a necessity following  the latter, which was a case of really bad stewarding by the federal government.
The chants of the people basically asking the ailing governments to "save our programs" have been repeated in the United States as well. What surprises me about this is not that students are angry about more fees, or that greek workers are angry about going without pay--I understand that these are terrible things to inflict upon any constituency--but that the people do not seem to believe that the crisis comes from the proverbial ocean of programs that the people have asked the government to initiate. We have come to think of the government like a community college student living in his parent's basement at 30 thinks of his mom--as an unending source of unlimited income and sustenance, which should always do more to help us do less. The problem is that the government is based upon our productivity: the taxes we pay run the programs we ask for, and so to create new programs, taxes must rise. But as the government removes more and more of our responsibility from us, we do less, and therefore are less capable of paying taxes and thus paying the debt that our government is taking on for us. The government earns less money in exchange for more expensive labor saving programs for its people, thus creating an economic sink hole of sorts, where there is never enough money to pay the bills that everyone puts on the tab of a government they don't care to see.
In short, the solution to our budget problems is inherently a difficultly conservative one: we need to cut ourselves from the umbilical cord we have tied to the Federal government and become a self-sustaining people. This is hard because the prospect of cheap insurance, housing subsidies, and even tax credits for having children look so good on face, but in the long run, they deteriorate our ability to live independent of governmental oversight, and worse, set a government that was never build to deal with such massive spending on a collision course with unsustainable projects.
 This is one reason why I support a very limited role for the federal government: i believe that a people should be relatively independent of their mother government. After all, John Locke and Rousseau, two philosophers who really gave birth to the idea of our governing system, saw mankind as independent, relying on government only in the resolution of conflict. it was fro this framework that mankind was said to have the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The ironic threat we now face is that the programs meant to create happiness for all people are destroying our inalienable right to liberty in the people they serve.