That's my conclusion as well. Rational thinking should be the guiding principle rather than collectivism.
That's why I prefer to only unite with others around highly specific issues rather than pools of issues (political platforms, parties, etc).
Discussion
you are describing voluntaryism. once you have full consent and opt-out, it seems weird to call it "government", even if it's mini. that's voluntary, consensual association and most people would call that anarchy.
its mostly semantics. the meaningful parts lie in the consent mechanics.
There is a difference between government and governance. We need rules that we all agree to and we can follow that help us move forward together. We don't need governments to draw lines on maps and tell us which rules we live by based on those stupid lines.
Yeah that sounds awesome except that isn't the real world. There are very much differences between the lines. We aren't all the same and that's exactly why new countries were formed. Governance without enforcement (government) is meaningless. More word salad.
Governments are unnecessary and a waste of capital.
But whatever.
I clearly disagree.
The differences between people on either side of those lines are meaningless. We are all the same. Countries have evolved over the past few centuries from empires and kingdoms. And those were created in order to maintain power and control. Wanting some people to maintain power and control over other people seems to be against the idea of objectivism, which I thought was anti-collectivism. Ayn Rand's philosophy was formed based on her experiences in the Soviet Union, and it was an attempt to reject those experiences. But modern nation states overreach with surveillance and regulatory bloat. We really do need to reexamine everything and figure out how to start over from scratch, using the Internet as a global communication system akin to a nervous system.
Word salad is all we have, because we can't communicate directly.
I DO agree that governments as they are are bad and a waste of money. We agree on that. I just don't think they are in principle when they exist solely to protect property rights. That includes prevention of force to settle disputes, protection from outside attacks, civil courts for contracts, etc.
For more specifics, I align with Rand's view of reasonable government. It doesn't do a whole lot.
Theory is always easier than practice. The principles of Thomas Paine's Common Sense evolved over time to become some of the components used in the US Constitution, but they're clearly different documents. Governments as they are today are the result of centuries of growth and change, and there is no way to fix what we have without a complete overhaul. Governments have NEVER existed to protect property rights. No nation-state was ever formed solely to protect property rights or individual liberty, as Rand envisioned. Instead, states typically served a mix of elite interests, collective security, economic needs, and cultural identity. Even when invoking rights, governments often subordinated them to pragmatic or collective goals—e.g., eminent domain, taxation, or war mobilization.
Rand's perspective was her own, but it had nothing to do with reality, it was an attempt to change the reality she saw. I can't idealize things in an academic construct and claim that 'this is how things should be', nor can anyone else.
According to the Ayn Rand Institute:
The government acts only as a policeman that protects man's rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.
This may sound good on paper, but it ignores the fundamental roles of government as defined by the Constitution of the United States:
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
So, from Rand's perspective, a good governance system for the United States would abolish the Constitution and institute a new set of roles, eliminating the desire to form a community of mankind, ignoring the need for domestic tranquility, ignoring the general welfare, etc. Capitalism in these terms is of course an economic system, but not a social system, and certainly not a system of governance worthy of discussion.