Your foreman or supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a week than the police do in a decade. If one looks at the world without prejudice but with an eye to maximizing freedom, the major coercive institution is not the state, it's work . Libertarians who with a straight face call for the abolition of the state nonetheless look on anti-work attitudes with horror. The idea of abolishing work is, of course, an affront to common sense. But then so is the idea of abolishing the state.
Libertarians are into linear reasoning and quantitative analysis.
If they applied these methods to test their own prescriptions they'd be in for a shock. That's the point of my Martian thought experiment. This is not to say that the state isn't just as unsavory as the libertarians say it is. But it does suggest that the state is important, not so much for the direct duress it inflicts on convicts and conscripts, for instance, as for its indirect back-up of employers who regiment employees, shopkeepers who arrest shoplifters, and parents who paternalize children. In these classrooms, the lesson of submission is learned.