A lot of this tripe goes back to Robert Nozick who argued (and it was immediately taken into the rightwing bloodstream) that the only things government was good for was policing and warfare. So in the US (and now in Canada) rightwingers are perfectly happy to ratchet up military spending ($636 billion in the US and counting for the new fiscal year) and throw people in prison, and support nothing else. This clearly ridiculous notion is behind all this hooha.

Tibet was a peasant state run by hierarchical medievalists before the Chinese came along -- the Dalai Lama has often stated that it was a failure and should have a secular government in future.   The freedoms the Tibetans had before the Chinese came along were more a function of the impossibility of controlling people in any real sense who live in unbelievably mountainous conditions. (Exactly the same is true of the ridiculousness of trying to control Afghanistan).

yours,

Peter T.