I think we agree, along with the United Nations, the World Bank, and the CIA, that a scattered assemblage of warlords was better for the people of Somalia than a brutal despot.

Is this because the warlords were more enlightened and selfless leaders than President Barre? I think it is because they had less power over the Somali people to advance their agendas. Pol Pot might have been a neighborhood nuisance had he not gotten his hands on the levers of political power.

Government does a lot of good. Government also enables the greatest harms humans have ever perpetrated against one another.

I would like to discuss these ideas rather than Rush Limbaugh's dining habits or Onkar Ghate's hairsplitting defense of hypocrisy charges against the Chosen One. I don't think the ideas are diminished simply because they are mouthed by legions of "smug, selfish assholes."

What are the ideas under discussion? We have:

Principled libertarianism holds that organizations are inherently corrupt by design.

and

The basic idea of Libertarianism is that capitalism can do no wrong

These are silly ideas, and I join you in dismissing them. Yet I find no mention of them in the platform of the Libertarian Party (itself an organization, and in my view a peculiar concept looking for a reason to exist). I poked around the Cato Institute, Reason Foundation, libertarianism.org, even Koch Industries trying to find the source for these notions.

Wikipedia even tells me that some libertarians "seek to abolish capitalism and private ownership of the means of production."

I am a proponent of capitalism, because I think it is the engine that has delivered billions of people out of poverty, where political institutions did not impede it. But capitalistic organizations can certainly do harm, not often by offering people voluntary opportunities to exchange, more often by scoring special favors from government to keep competitors down or burn food in cars.

Here's a summing-up of your summing-up:

1. We need government to solve the problem of paying for public goods like roads.

This particular problem was solved in antiquity. The United States has a rich history of privately-run turnpikes.

This isn't a perfect solution, especially in our age. But the big challenge is not figuring out how get people to pay for something they want, it is coordinating construction among a disorganized patchwork of property owners. Government does not have a good solution to this problem. Government has a bad solution to this problem: forcing people out of their homes for the greater good.

In 1993, Donald Trump bought several lots around his Atlantic City casino and hotel, intending to build a parking lot designed for limousines. Coking, who had lived in her house at that time for about 35 years, refused to sell. When Coking refused to sell to Trump, the city of Atlantic City condemned her house, using the power of eminent domain. Her designated compensation was to be $251,000, about one quarter of what Guccione had offered her 10 years earlier.

I know whose side I am on in that fight, and am relieved that the homeowner prevailed in the end.

(I don't think this example is representative of the way roads get built, but it illustrates the way the weak can fall prey to the strong when the use of coercion is institutionalized.)

The public goods argument is a sound justification for government activity. I believe that only a small fraction of government expense today goes to providing public goods. And where the justification is stronger, as it is for providing national defense, the negative side effects can be enormous.

I believe that self-interested, self-organizing people could provide a lot of what is demanded by others. A free market unleashes incredible creativity. I believe that even people with little spending power would often get better results than they do today. I also have moral qualms about forcing people to pay for anything, but that is one of my more eccentric ideas.

2. Without government, we can't solve difficult tragedy-of-the-commons problems, like protecting bison.

These are very difficult problems, and governments also struggle to deal with overfishing, carbon emission, protection of wildlife, and pollution. Sometimes government appears to make the problem worse. The powerful central governments in the Soviet Bloc created the worst ecological disasters. Sometimes market-based approaches show unexpected promise.

If government had better leaders, and was more efficient, and less subject to special interest influence, it might be more successful. But I don't see a way to relieve government of these defects. I am wary of the argument "Government hasn't solved it yet. Let's try more government."