This is the conundrum of libertarianism: without some form of social order, liberty is meaningless. Peer pressure shapes a lot of our thinking and behavior; we naturally seek the approval of the people around us, and the people around us seek our approval, and (although there are certainly exceptions) it tends to converge on a reasonably rational system.

The innovation that Western civilization added to this is the rule of law, which creates a structure in which social order can evolve reasonably free from bullies and strongmen. So yes, in order to have liberty, we must have some government -- without government, liberty is impossible. The flip side is: without liberty, govenrment is meaningless, and that's the catch -- if government becomes simpluy a vehicle for strongmen and glorified tribal rule, then from the libertarian's standpoint, it is no better than anarchy.

Thus, government's interaction with the organic social order is a delicate thing. As we see e.g. in the case of welfare in the Western nations, the government under the guise of "helping" can easily do things that cause social order to break down. The trick to good government is to create a base of law that does the minimum necessary to undue pressure from would-be dictators off of the society, and then (most of the time) stand back and let the society do its thing. Unfortunately, that's not the type of government that any Western nation has today.

@"This is the conundrum of libertarianism: without some form of social order, liberty is meaningless"

Are you conflating 'libertarianism' with 'anarchism'? They aren't the same thing, and many (if not most) libertarians agree there should be a government. Anarchism is just logically inconsistent.

We've done a lot in the West over the last 50 years to break down any semblance of internal, self-regulating social order, under the pretense of getting rid of "patriarchal institutions" and other "systems of oppression." In some cases, there were things that had to go, but in many cases, we threw the baby out with the bathwater and removed the underpinnings of social interaction that would make it possible to have a truly libertarian society. Now books like I See Rude People and Good Manners for Nice People who Sometimes Say F*ck are actually necessary, because we have at least one generation of adults who have grown up not understanding how to coexist with other people.

To some extent this was intentional. What it has done is undercut the case for a libertarian society; the statists and other control freaks left and right can claim, after fifty years of destroying social institutions, that government and rules and cameras and drones are needed to protct us, since we have become unfit to govern ourselves. And thus, a proud people have fallen. Sic transit gloria America.

"Are you conflating 'libertarianism' with 'anarchism'?"

No, I'm not. I pointed out that liberty cannot be preserved wtihout social order, and social order requires a form of government to create the space for it to exist. What I'm riffing on is the irony that, while government is required for liberty, excessive government or the wrong kind of government inevitably destroys liberty, and it does so in part by breaking down the social order that it is supposed to protect.

I've been thinking a lot about the sociology of fortresses lately. I'm doing improv here, so bear with me... Throughout history, people have faced the problem of how to protect themselves from external threats, and the most common answer has been to establish a fortofication for themselves to live in. But once you've done that, you run into a slew of problems. A society that barricades itself in a fortress tends to turn into a conformist, garrison-like society. This is due in part to the absence of interchange of ideas with the larger world, and in part due to the fact that a fortress doesn't protect against internal threats. The security-minded say, "Oh, we can solve that problem... we'll create a bunch of mini-fortifications inside the big one, and that will limit the effects of any inside threat." But trying to establish a society that functions without trust relationships never works... by suppressing liberty, it inhibits the person-to-person interactions that are necesary for a society to function. Further, it creates a demand for extreme conformity... everyone has to fit into a specific box, and anyone who doesn't must be a threat, according to the reasoning. The best possible result is things like the state that Japan was in when Admiral Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay.

The reason I'm thinking about this is because it looks like in order for our society to survive, we're going to have to establish Fortress America. The post-WWII policy of preemptive military action abroad has, rightly or wrongly, been pretty well rejected by the American people (and I'm not up for debating that now; I'm taking it as a fait accompli). This is happening as disorder and threats are building around the world: western Europe is collapsing, the death cult that is Islam is gaining adherents around the world; an increasingly belligerent Communist/Facist government remains in control in China; and the old demons have re-awakened in Russian, complete with all of the ambitions and lusts from the Czars to Lenin and Stalin.

So we're going to have to become a lot more self-sufficient. We're used to buying goods from a lot of these countries, but what's about to happen is that either the countries will no longer have the capability to make the goods, or they will no longer sell them to us, of if they do, said goods will be Trojan horses designed to harm us in some manner. Further, the world has gotten a lot smaller; geography no longer provides us much protection. We're going to have to close our borders, and anything or anyone coming in will have to be highly scrutinized and regulated.

So the obvious dangers are there once we sharply limit our interaction with the outside world. It would be far too easy to fall into a garrison society, considering how determined our government is to establish a universal police state and how many people seem to be OK with that. If you thought the 1950s was a conformist, bigoted era, you ain't seen nothing yet, and it won't have the advantage of being the sort of highly productive era that the 1950s was. It is highly possible that, without outside help (for where there currently appears to be no source), we could win the fortification battle but lose the internal war, becoming a structure whose exterior is still solid, but the interior is a burned-out shell.

A government can be many things, but if they fail to support basic property rights reasonably fairly, and instead become just another kleptocracy, abject poverty will soon follow.

Companies do not grow or invest in places where the government can seize all their assets by decree. It is too risky.

The chlorination program will work, as long as the people sponsoring it keep doing it for free, and monitor it. If they stop doing it, the behavior will not stick, because the benefits of chlorination are not readily visible or affordable but the individuals who benefit.