You're obviously not familiar with the massive economic literature on the many, many various ways governments distort economies, create waste and hamstring growth - all while often utterly failing to achieve stated goals.
This isn't to say that governments aren't providers of certain goods (national and personal security, protection of property, legal systems, systems for pricing and controlling externalities) that are critical for growth.
So to combat my personal opinion that advocates of naked Libertarianism are essentially juvenile, you provide a naked display of naive realism:
The three "tenets" of naive realism are:
That I see entities and events as they are in objective reality, and that my social attitudes, beliefs, preferences, priorities, and the like follow from a relatively dispassionate, unbiased and essentially "unmediated" comprehension of the information or evidence at hand.
That other rational social perceivers generally will share my reactions, behaviors, and opinions—provided they have had access to the same information that gave rise to my views, and provided that they too have processed that information in a reasonably thoughtful and open-minded fashion.
That the failure of a given individual or group to share my views arises from one of three possible sources—
- the individual or group in question may have been exposed to a different sample of information than I was (in which case, provided that the other party is reasonable and open minded, the sharing or pooling of information should lead us to reach an agreement);
- the individual or group in question may be lazy, irrational, or otherwise unable or unwilling to proceed in a normative fashion from objective evidence to reasonable conclusions; or
- the individual or group in question may be biased (either in interpreting the evidence, or in proceeding from evidence to conclusions) by ideology, self-interest, or some other distorting personal influence.
This isn't to say that governments aren't providers of certain goods (national and personal security, protection of property, legal systems, systems for pricing and controlling externalities) that are critical for growth.