What if it’s a big, scruffy homeless man who reeks of beer and hasn’t showered in a week?
No it hasn’t, and no it can’t.
Private households aren’t anarchic. They’re usually communist oligarchies.
Well, you can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you.
This is pretty much answered by:
Also if you remodel your house, you’re probably going to get a building permit. If you try to sell candy out of your front room, you’ll probably hear from the zoning commission. Hell, if your house is in an HOA, you might not be allowed to park your car in your driveway overnight.
If you beat or starve your kids or your dog, you’ll notice a little government creaping into your private household. Likewise if you have enough trash and old newspapers stacked up to constitute a health hazard. You’re not allowed to spray asbestos flocking on your ceiling or paint your walls with lead paint. You can’t spray DDT in your garden.
Like virtual particles flickering in deep space, the government is present in every part of your household.
That’s a really bad argument.
The reason your house can exist in relative safety without the government inside of it is because the government is protecting it from the outside. If the government didn’t exist, crime would rise and would come into your house.
And let’s not forget threats from outside your territory. The larger your populace and territory, the greater the incentive for some international bully to decide that you might benefit from a little governing, after all.
To avoid being overrun, you’ll need to create some combination of a respectable military, and national alliances. So who negotiates and enforces the alliances, and who’s to stop the military from filling the vacuum of power?
That’s my line and I hold a copyright on it! 
It’s also very true. The absence of government is one of those things that sounds terrific until one takes a few seconds to consider what a government actually is and what it’s for.
Because obviously there’s no such thing as spousal abuse or child molestation. Seriously, I don’t know about you, but I’d call those things chaos. Even in a “private household”, things don’t always work out harmoniously.
Then… no. Definitely no.
Heh. I have been known to tell my kids that they live in a benign dictatorship with occasional nonbinding referenda (such as “Where should we go for dinner tonight?”).
This already happened! There was a scuffle in anarchy, and one group of strongmen did take control. The nations of Europe are descended from the warrior-kings who seized control in exactly that way, and the U.S. is descended from European nations.
The Whisky Rebellion was an attempt to change this. The government put it down. Later, the Confederate States of America sought to alter the balance, and this, too, was put down by force.
We live in a strange form of anarchy: it has decided to limit itself, somewhat, by allowing us to vote for our leadership. It won’t allow us to vote to dissolve itself wholly – and if that were to happen, it would rise, a Phoenix from the ashes, establishing itself anew.
People will stop ruling each other about the time people stop hitting each other. Let me know when we get close to that, but I’m betting never.
Also, it’s totally wrong to say that Somalia doesn’t have a government. Somalia as a country doesn’t have an effective national government, sure. But various parts of Somalia are governed by various groups of armed men, who have a hierarchical system of organization, often on classical patriarchal lines. Same with other famous anarchies, like Kowloon Walled City. It wasn’t ruled by Hong Kong or by China, but that doesn’t mean it was anarchic. It was tightly ruled by an organized crime syndicate. That is, if “crime syndicate” means anything in the absence of a larger government that deems the organization criminal. If your crime syndicate amasses enough power to seize the reins of government then it’s not a crime syndicate anymore.
Note of course that the same sorts of organizational techniques used by patriarchal tribes and crime families are exactly the sorts of things that “governments” do, just often in a more amateurish and slapdash way. If your tribal leadership really gets its shit together suddenly your tribal patriarch is a king, or your mob boss is a mayor–or more likely the mayor takes orders from the mob boss.
And this is how states formed in the first place, the difference between aristocrats and mafiosi is paper thin and can easily be breached in both directions. One day you’re a bandit in the hills, and then you’re a revolutionary, and then you’re the Secretary General of the national communist party which controls the entire country.
Welcome to anarchy!
Two comments. Somalia as an example of the libertarian ideal is intended to be semi-humorous rather than literal, to illustrate the fact that governments do important and useful things in maintaining an orderly, just, and civilized society.
Secondly, I agree with your descriptions of the kinds of organizations that develop in the absence of a sufficiently strong government, and indeed we can even see it happening in the rule of the wealthy and the corporatocracy in contemporary western society. But this is precisely the point of having government. Humans are social creatures that will always self-organize, but in the absence of either benevolent or democratic rule, that organization will take the form of the strongest and most ruthless seizing all the power and wealth for themselves. Such a system, completely devoid of any rational foundation or any fairness or justice, is as good a description of anarchy as any other; it is certainly a consequence of it.
I think the OP might just be referring to the federal government, which is, as he said, mostly absent from individual households. This is because the federal government is small government. State and local government, however, is big government, and it gets bigger the lower-level it gets. If you truly believe in small government, then, you should support the federal government, and oppose state and local government. Oddly, however, this is exactly the opposite of what is done by most who say they believe in small government.
I understand the argument for smaller government. I support that argument. But to argue for no government at all is an idea that should be dismissed after about four seconds of thought.
Even if 99.99% of people wouldn’t rape, murder, and pillage, there is that .01% that will. Who punishes them? How are they punished? What rights does a person have that is accused of rape or murder?
Once you decide that question, you set up a system and you have: government.
Perhaps you are confused about the basic ideas of libertarianism. Libertarianism is a system in which property rights are respected either through tradition, a strictly limited government, or competing providers of law. To simply say a place without central govt is a libertarian paradise lacks crucial understanding. Government is anathema to libertarianism in so far as it as an aggressor against property rights, nothing more.
Somalian society has little respect for property rights, and inadequate mechanisms for their enforcement. What is notable about Somalia is how much better off Somalia has been without a strong central government. Of course, they still live with the periodical interventions of the most powerful intervener the world has known. This contributes to their backwardness.
“Somalia the well-known Libertarian Paradise” isn’t a claim that Somalia is in any real way libertarian. It’s an argument that the limited government envisaged by libertarians cannot actually deliver this veneration of property rights and the result will be a devolution into rule by local warlords. Without a strong presentation of why limited or no government could actually produce a Libertopia, complaining that Somalia doesn’t uphold libertarian ideals is somewhat akin to the devoted communist proclaiming “Communism has never really been tried” when faced with the utter failure of the ideology around the world. Not quite as bad, since communism has failed in many places while Somalia is just one country, but still the same sort of argument.
So your small government :
-collects more taxes than any other entity on Earth
-spends more money than any other entity on Earth
-has the most powerful, and most active, military on Earth
-has the largest domestic and foreign spy apparatus on Earth
-has a Dept of Defense that is the largest employer on Earth. ( not including vast sums of contractors’ employees that would otherwise be occupied supplying consumer goods.)
-is the biggest polluter on Earth
-has more military bases in foreign countries than anyone on Earth.
This is quite an interesting theory, I’ll have to further investigate.
No libertarian has ever said that removing govt creates paradise. What they have said is that in a given society, that society will be better off without a monopolist provider of law and coercion.
This claim has been empirically supported in Somalia, not disproven.
Statists like to put words in the mouths of libertarians because they haven’t read their shit, and their knowledge of the political theory comes from articles on Salon.
Would it make you feel better if I told you I’d read Anarchy, State, and Utopia?