Well, we're starting the 4th day of the government shutdown with all the attendant finger-pointing. Personally, I park this particular monkey squarely on the back of the Tea Party republicans. I get that they don't "like" the Affordable Health Care Act (at least I get that they don't like it - why they don't like it is another matter), but to make funding the operations of the government dependent on de-funding the AHCA strikes me as bordering on disloyalty to the U.S. These are the actions of petulant children, not democratically elected "leaders".
Of course, Tea Party advocates would complain about the ever-encroaching reach of government, and there is some merit to such a view. The difficulty comes from trying to discern where the reach of government has gone too far, where it's just about right, and where it hasn't gone far enough. Tea Party folks take to heart a quote that they often wrongfully attribute to Thomas Jefferson: "That government is best which governs least." - a quote that actually owes it's genesis to an article in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, and which appears in the form often used in Thoreau's Civil Disobedience. It's a thought which many find to be common sense, but in the modern world what does that mean?
What is the role of government in our lives? The most basic role is to defend our liberties, and for that we have the Armed Forces. But wait, defend our liberties (what are those) against what threats? The armed forces are particularly suited to defend our liberties against foreign powers, though one could argue that many times when the armed forces have been employed (at the direction of political leaders) they've been employed to advance the interests of a narrow sub-set of our society and not to protect our liberty. Having "done my part" during the Viet Nam war, I can state that the intent of protecting liberty is there in those that volunteer to serve, and the misuse of that intent is a crime for which they should not be blamed. Nonetheless, the armed forces are there to protect us against foreign threats, and they have done so.
The rub comes from other threats to our liberty. We have an environmental protection agency - is that there to protect our liberty? In my opinion - yes. Rampant pollution threatens not just our liberty, but our lives. We can see what happens when there is no regulation of industry in places such as China, and we've certainly seen it (and still see it) in our country. What about Health and Human Services? Again, when citizens lack access to adequate nutrition, where's their liberty? What about education? Perhaps the biggest threat to liberty is ignorance, and though I think the government has over-reached here (can you say No Child Left Behind?), it is vital for our continued existence to produce an educated public.
I could go on through the various government agencies, but you get the picture (I hope). We face a variety of threats to our liberty and our lives which we as individuals are not capable of addressing. Only the collective power of the government can defend us against those threats, and since we ARE the government, we can determine how much or how little we want government participation in that defense. But government can't do any of that if it's shut down - simply because some zealots don't like a particular act.
