Does Government Protect Us?

"By acknowledging that the state not only takes on many tasks that libertarians do not favor but also fails to protect life and liberty as much as some of us might want, we see that the state is simply not the source of our freedom and security. This realization will help us avoid all the pitfalls of conservative "limited" government ? especially the warmongering and affinity to the police state. Consider violent street crime. We owe civil society to the market, community, family, property rights, private security firms and agents, private ownership of firearms, and a widely if not consistently upheld ethical tradition of natural law that has been taught and learned and shared and cultivated and refined for thousands of years. The common law itself developed chiefly from market transactions and spontaneously emerging community standards, not from the state; the state merely absorbed and co-opted law as it has so many other functions of the market and civil exchange."