[tlrobinson]

Are you advocating anarchy then?

"They provide services but they can only do so by monopolizing the service they provide and _taking_ other peoples money to finance the administration of that service."

I just don't get this. How do you expect them to pay for services? And let's not forget that "the government" isn't some magic entity, it's made up of the citizens of the country itself. I'm pretty sure the US government employs more citizens than any other organization in the US.

I would say that many of the services and infrastructure the government typically provides are considered "natural monopolies". It doesn't make sense to have a bunch of parallel roads when you can have one. Same with water, electricity, etc. With the government providing a single "set" of infrastructure you may need X miles of road, pipe, power lines, or whatever, if you had 4 companies competing you would need 4 times as much, which would end up costing the end user 4 times more.

But in fact, the government doesn't have a complete monopoly on roads, since there are privately owned toll roads, which you have to pay to drive on. Would you prefer all roads were privately owned, and the owners could then charge arbitrarily high tolls?