Government is not bad. They can be good.
Government can be anything and do anything. The problem is, when you put people (not super-humans, or heroes, or messiahs, but regular people) in complete charge of other people, the people given power tend to use that power for personal gain at the expense of the others. Because of this trait in human beings, who, when given both power and a varying freedom from being relieved of that power (democracy vs. dictatorship), thus resulting in a complete lack of responsibility of that power, tend to abuse that power, if not at first, later in their rule. Governments generally act in a way that is, at best, inconvenient to the lives of the many, and at worst,
fatal.So, although government can potentially do only good, or at least mostly good, recall that government is made of normal people, who have proven, time and time again, that when coupled with power and lack of responsibility to maintain that power, will become corrupt, and only more corrupt the more power they are given. Hoping for a perfect nation with a perfect people and a perfect government is unrealistic, and especially pointless once one comes to the conclusion that a "one, true government" is not necessary, nor desirable.
Certainly, the proxy killer who has less deaths under his belt is not more preferable than the proxy killer who has more; they're both killers and undesirable. If given a choice between one type of cancer and another type of cancer, we don't ponder the benefits of having the lesser cancer; we instead decide we don't want any type of cancer at all; there is no "lesser of two evils" when we acknowledge the idea of having no evil at all. Much like the atheist came to the conclusion that no religion is likely to be any more correct than the other, as much as each is comparably and almost equally far from the truth, the anarchist identifies the many types of government as detrimental, and realizes it is preferable to be ruled by his conscious and natural consequence than by the coercion of a coalition of sociopaths.
And what would the solution to this be? Anarchy?
Without government, who would keep society "civilized"?
Well first its important to recognize where civilization comes from. it doesnt come from government, it comes from people working to gather for mutual benefit, it comes from voluntary exchange. government is just an entity in a society that is widely believed to have the right to break the law. for example everyone knows that extortion is illegal, unless the government does it then its called taxation, even though its fundamentally the same set of physical actions. So anarchy is not lawlessness, lawlessness is what we have now, laws dont apply to government. ironically anarchy is the proposition that we should end lawlessness.
ok so if we have a society where the majority of the population are violent barbarians, than anarchy cant be expected to work well. but then of course neither can a statist society. a bunch of violent barbarians are not going to elect wise reasonable rulers and then obey them and solve the problem of having a violent barbaric society. so any hopes for either a statist or an anarchist society that would look even remotely desirable to you or i are going to rely on the assumption that most people are reasonably honest, cooperative, orderly and respectful.
If you go knocking door to door where i live these are generally the sorts of people you meet. i know in the cities its not like that and thats mostly because of the incentives crafted by welfare dependency and single parent households which are also largely a product of state involvement in courts and and the enabling effect of welfare. so unfortunately this generally civilized nature of people in general is being changed by the state but it isnt too late yet.
ok so if we have 10-20% of the population that is dishonest and uncivilized and 80-90% who are civilized than the solution is simple. If an individual is honest than it is very cheap for him to buy assurance. Since assurance is very cheap for honest decent people we can resasonably expect most decent honest people to have assurance. This means that if you encounter someone who does not have assurance, you can reasonably expect him to be some sort of scoundrel. This means that if you encounter someone who does not have assurance than you will tend to refrain from contracting with him since there is likely someone else near by offering the same service who does have assurance. In affect this means that people who are unassurable are cut out of the economy. This reverses the incentives for people who would be willing to engage in fraud, and makes it so that even though they would be willing to engage in fraud, it is no longer in their interest to do so.
this solves the problem with 99% of criminals. all criminals who are interested in crime for the sake of improving their status or increasing their material influence. it does not however deal with the problem of the proverbial "axe wielding maniac". A person who is not interested in status or material gain, but rather sees causing harm to others as the end rather than a means, can not be controlled by assurance. For this sort of person you buy insurance. Say you have a policy that will pay out 10 million dollars if you happen to be the victim of an axe attack. This puts incentives in the right place for the insurance company to find the most cost effective way of addressing the axe murdering problem. It may be the case that police patrols are the right answer, and if they were than we would have police patrols, but i doubt it.
the last and hardest crime problem we have to deal with is war, that is the aggressive neighboring nation. again this problem roughly falls into the same catigories as the former only on a larger scale. assurance may be effective to some extent but mostly we would rely on insurance. if you dont want something to happen to you, then buy insurance against it. the insurance companies, not waning to pay out on claims will find the most cost effective way of preventing aggression by other nations. this would probably boil down to border control and lobbying. the anarchist society would most likely have the best funded lobbying presence in the world in statist societies. it would most likely dwarf even the pharmaceutical lobby. if there is one thing we can learn from statist societies its that lobbies can control governments. Of course i could be wrong maybe it would find a standing army to be more cost effective deterrent, but i highly doubt it.
in the event that you are about to scream pubic goods problem!, public goods problem! then here is a youtube video about how to fund public goods on a free market.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQvjZ12Vpko