Some people tend to believe governments are the root of all evil.
Indeed, politicians tend to be either corrupt, incompetent or focusing more on manipulating voters than making the world a better place to be. Crony capitalism is a big problem. Democracy does not work. BUT, I agree very much with the old Churchill quote:
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
I was just writing a long comment to a post postulating (among other things) that "everything would be better without a government", in a nutshell my point is that huge public companies are bound to become evil unless they are controlled ... by some kind of government!
I'm considering rewriting that comment into an independent post.
I can understand their thinking and know how their logic works. They see horrible wars and injustices done by governments - therefore, governments are evil. Problem is: this is too shortsighted. I think a slow shift towards more liberty and less government is the only way a libertarian society can every be achieved.
Any sudden revolutions won't do any good. People need to want these things for themselves or it will fail.
Hm. This is something I disagree with on a theoretical level. The current political system protects big companies via tax reliefs, subsidies, minimum wages, etc. I never understood the logic of people who complained about corrupt governments and their liaison with big companies - and then wanted to make said government more powerful.
The more tools of control you provide, the more likely it will be, that someone is searching for opportunities to manipulate said tools to his own advantages. But if these tools are rendered useless, the incentive to do so decreases.
Hayek coined a phrase for that:
Because as soon as you "made it", you like to have a strong government behind you which can protect you against market competition.
Yes, the more laws and regulations, the harder it is for small companies to get established, and it also seems to me that quite many laws and regulations that (allegedly) are in place to prevent corruption only makes corruption more likely.
Still, at least from my point of view, the government here is doing more good than bad. Toxic rivers have been cleaned up, there is generally less pollution, waste is taken better care of, the public transport system works, schools work (even though they're indoctrinating the kids to become good Microsoft users, and still to some extent being used as a tool by the church), there is a positive trend that data produced by tax payers money are released into the public domain (even though a lot of work remains on that field) . Today I'm off from work with a sick leave, though admittedly there is a problem that the social benefits are abused by people whom are simply too lazy to work.
We need more transparency, a better working democracy, accountable politicians, a functional and independent press, functional and independent juridical bodies, but I don't think we need abolition of the government.
The problem is not with democracy per se, the problem is that our "liberal democracies" never democratized the economy. Unless you democratize the economy political power will be invariably coopted by, basically, the 1% (what you describe as crony capitalism, but which is just capitalism).
You can control corporate power with regulations as you suggest, but we have seen what happened after FDR: corporate power was shackled to a degree but it started a slow but steady attack and is now wreaking havoc again. Capitalism cannot be shackled, it will undo any regulation given enough time. The real way to combat corporate power is to prevent them from being so powerful in the first place, ie. democratize the workplace, democratize the economy.
EDIT: The Chomsky of course says it better