How about the state?

It's absolutely necessary so to me it all comes back to a government truly run by the people. and powerful enough to protect itself from outside influences.

Who are "the people"?

The more powerful the government, the more it exceeds the function of prohibiting aggression and fraud among the people, the more "the people" will be divided over what else the government should do.

The more divided "the people" the more the government will be managed by a relative few.

The government (not party) is the problem, not the solution. And, government seems to be on a blue light special these days.

However, the Republicans since being defeated in the first Clinton presidency on the shutdown of the government budget battle, have become just as socialistic as the democrats. So I agree with martin about the obvious hypocrisy we see in the Republican party.

BTW, Check out this just for grins:

http://www.ridelust.com/the-real-price-of-oil-dollars-gold-and-the-price-of-tea-in-china/

But I wouldn't leave out the democrats, they are equally evil fascists. The differences between the two parties are the groups they want to steal from and the group they want to do favors for.

Libertarians are to the Republican party what blacks are to the Democratic party, a marginal voice that can be expected to tow the line because the only other option is even more distasteful. We're even less influential than the Religious Right, another marginal faction of the Republican coalition, if only because they outnumber us. The real powers in the Republican party are the corporatists in the military industrial complex, the farm lobby and similar groups.

Of course, these groups could hardly care less about free markets. The farm lobby on the contrary is the most protected productive sector on Earth, while the military industrial complex essentially has a single customer in the state.

That was a condensed version of "America's great depression" by Murray Rothbard. Thanks for sharing.

I found this analogy very interesting

A brief analogy will illustrate
this point. If a thief goes house to
house robbing everybody in the
neighborhood, then heads off to
a nearby shopping mall to spend
his ill-gotten loot, it is not assumed
that because his spending
“stimulated” the stores at the mall
he has thereby performed a national
service or provided a general
economic benefit. Likewise, when
the government hires someone to
catalog the many ways of cooking
spinach, his tax-supported
paycheck cannot be counted as a
net increase to the economy because
the wealth used to pay him
was simply diverted, not created.
Economists today must still battle
this “magical thinking” every time
more government spending is
proposed — as if money comes
not from productive citizens, but
rather from the tooth fairy.