If the goal is a minimalist government why would we want sub-national units? These would seem to only add an additional layer of government; the question you ask is moot without them.
Forget “culture”. Either would require a radical alteration and augmentation of humanity to work without being either disastrous failures or tyrannies. The resulting people wouldn’t be human in any meaningful sense.
I’m not talking about absolute goals here, or any kind of super-human. Rationality isn’t a new thing, it’s just not common. Any change that makes more humans consider the consequences of their actions to a larger extent is a good thing, and will reduce the need for government action. It’s not as if reducing the need for government action is a bad thing, is it?
I think there are some other fundamental questions on this issue.
Should a government defend your rights or should a government merely be prohibited from itself restricting your rights?
Is a government only allowed to do things which it is explicitly required to do or is it allowed to do things it is not explicitly prohibited from doing?
Are there limits to what a people can democratically tell their government to do?
Since it would require that individual humans pick up the slack, yes it is. You’d have to have “humans” so intelligent and powerful that they can do the jobs of entire government agencies if you wanted to create a society even the equal of ours, much less better. And you need “humans” so morally perfect and rigidly devoted to libertarian dogma that they don’t take advantage of the weaknesses and flaws in such a system. You need “humans” that are both more and less than human; more capable but less flexible.
I don’t think we understand each other. Please consider the possibility that I didn’t mean anything close to what you seem to have understood from my posts.
All I’m saying is that a more rational population will require less support, and less intervention, from government. Is this really a radical opinion?
I don’t really share more than an ideal of individual self-sufficiency and responsibility with large-L Libertarians. Good ideals to have, I’d say. Among other ideals, like equal opportunity, universal education and universal health care. We still need a strong government to ensure these ideals are met, and will for the foreseeable future.
But I can imagine a society where we don’t need the government be as active as it is now in many areas. Because it isn’t needed. I think I’d like that.
It’s an opinion based on a IMHO really low estimate of what it would take to create a significantly “more rational population” for these purposes, given the limits of the human brain.
As individuals humans are weak and helpless. In order to make an individual as capable as a present-day group, the individual would have to be enhanced far beyond human limitations. And either travel off into deep space to be alone or live in a heavily controlled/programmed society, because other equally augmented individuals will in a group be stronger still.
It is needed; our present government does too little, not too much.
At present, the law (in Florida, at least; I believe in many other states) already recognizes a tort of “civil theft,” for which treble damages may be awarded. E.g.: You’re due an insurance payment of $1,000. By a clerical error, you get a check for $2,000. If you have knowledge you were not due the extra $1,000, and you keep it anyway, the insurance company can sue you and recover $3,000.
In the above instance keeping it anyway does not constitute a crime, only a tort, because the money was freely handed to you. But you, it seems, would abolish the distinction.
I don’t practice criminal law, but I’m pretty sure sentencing for theft-as-crime is not based on the amount stolen (except insofar as the amount meets or does not meet a threshold between petty theft and grand theft, an amount varying by jurisdiction). It is based on whether this is the thief’s first offense, and perhaps other aggravating or mitigating factors. The thinking is that all of that is a better gauge of how dangerous this person is to others, than how much his victim happened to have in the house or in his pocket or whatever. What makes you think differently?
Well, I haven’t fully ironed out the details of my ideal government yet. 
I suppose in the case of a petty theft, the thief should be made to repay the victim as you said, but rather than house and feed the guy at taxpayer expense, fine him or her an amount equal to what he stole. This way, the thief still ends up paying double, but there’s no real incentive for people to go around falsely accusing others of stealing.
My particular ideology doesn’t say throw away regulations that make sense. I personally think that public safety is a very legitimate role of government, as is building infrastructure; both of these have been functions of government for as long as civilization has existed.
Incarcerating or fining someone for the things he does in the privacy of his own home, and that have no potential to harm anyone but himself, have nothing to do with public safety. Those types of laws seem more about enforcing some arbitrary definition of morality, the sole basis of which is emotion, not reason.
I certainly don’t understand why an evil under constitutional authority (which I have an opportunity to vote against at election time) would be better replaced by an evil under the authority of a corporate charter (in which I would have to invest my money in order to have a say, and my say would only be commensurate with how much money I put in).
I really scratch my head at the notion of privatizing everything. Privatize the roads? You can’t be serious! Like I want to have to stop and pay another toll every time I turn onto another street! Do they even think about what a pain in the ass that would be for everyone who ever has to use a road?
Are you speaking of the possibility of such occuring, or do you mean that in the absence of wage laws, mass starvation is inevitable?
Sure, though I think that falls under #2, “the power to enforce laws.” Assuming a democracy, yes, there’d need to be an apparatus to ensure reasonably free and fair elections, or the government would be toppled on that basis.
To be clear, I’m not advocating for any given model of government, I’m asking if a minarchist government will inevitably be replaced by warlords, or otherwise fall or transform.
That said, no, I don’t think the power to control education is necessary for a government to exist and keep existing.
Not just wage laws, we are talking about the entire social safety net. And yes; we know from history that without such laws and such programs you have masses of desperate people and widespread hunger on a semi-regular basis. And starvation whenever there’s a major economic disruption; the Great Depression being a historically recent example, where people were eating bark and grass to fill their stomachs.
One step more minimal - a government doesn’t have to have the power to tax to exist. It has to have the ability to generate revenue. A truly “min” government could sustain itself from commercial investments. Since it wasn’t exerting any regulatory power anyway, it could fairly compete in the market. Of course you may eventually lose your government due to market forces, but that will be long after your “min” government is overthrown due to social injustice.
Well, famine (and other disaster) relief is a traditional government activity that goes back thousands of years. I would say that a minarchist government could still engage in disaster relief on a temporary basis.
Are you crediting increased food production and the decrease in starvation to government programs? Do you know how naive that sounds when the government was destroying food by the ton during the Great Depression?
Not to mention the fact that government intervention into the economy caused the stock market bubble of the 1920’s. Later Hoover’s and Roosevelt’s attemps to keep wage rates high in the face of falling prices has been found to be a major cause of the persistence of the Great Depression. Your holy government was starving people by the millions.