Is the Alliance Evil? (Firefly)

I watched Serenity recently and while it was entertaining it certainly wasn't worthy of multiple viewings at $10 a pop as some fans have done but that's neither here nor there. My question is whether the Alliance as portrayed in the series and movie can be considered evil?

By evil let us define the standard. The Empire in Star Wars is evil. The Federation in Star Trek (communist tendencies aside) is not evil. Consider those your happy extremes.

In the commentary for Serenity the director made a very interesting observation. He says that the only real bad thing about the Alliance is that it is trying to tell people what to do even though what they are telling them to do is obstensively good for them no government or institution should tell people what to do.

This leads to the thought - The Alliance is not evil merely what they're trying to do, control and manipulate people's behavior can be considered evil - and even then a case can be made for it being misguided and it wouldn't be the first government to think it knew what was better for its people than its own people.

But then you have things like the experiments on River and the Pax experiment that went and created the Reavers. Those can definitely be considered evil.

But hasn't every government in history carried out covert operations and experiments to try and make things better? Does that make every government in history evil?

Wouldn't the end result of the Pax been good - ie. happy people everywhere? or is it an abomination of thought control?

What are your thoughts? Examples from the series and movie are welcome.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Styphon, as the creator of this thread, would it be too much to ask you to ban Cyantre for a day or two, so he has a chance to calm down?

EDIT; Thank you.

How ya doing, buddy?