What is really behind the Conservative's need to limit government?

As LongShot suggests in his recent post on this topic, drawing the line on what government should and should not do is tough so he thinks the best idea is to limit government to a defense institution and forget the rest. That seems to be a common Conservative position. And those Conservatives who acknowledge the benefits of some government programs cover this by asserting, as LongShot does, that the rest can be accomplished by the underlying society without government's help.

This is an easy stand to take, I think, but it seems completely naive if we are really serious about doing these things on our own. My bet, in fact, is that most Conservatives never intend to actually do these other things through the underlying society and think they'd be happy enough without them. (But I'll leave that aside for the moment.) What strikes me as naive in this position is that there seems to be no realistic consideration of how much time and money it would take to organize all of these programs on a local level. In contrast, the national government offers an economy-of-scale because millions of people pay for it through their taxes and many people devote full time to thinking through what kinds of programs are needed. Have Conservatives considered what the cost to them would be if they ventured to create similar institutions locally on their own?

As we speak, FEMA is bringing aid to people who are victims of flooding in Nashville. All of us are helping to pay for this and it has been organized well in advance. Is the Conservative solution to just say, "Tough luck, Tennessee; you'll have to raise the money yourselves with bake sales"? I think that there's something fundamentally dishonest in the Conservative argument.