Really? You want exclusively private highways? Has any government ever, in the history of mankind, not created this sort of basic infrastructure? Especially in a country as large as the US, surely many areas would be terribly underserved as their government highways are a losing proposition.

If full private highways and the risk of some areas being underserved are an inevitable consequence of not handing responsibility for building highways to an entity that uses force and aggression to get its way, then yes, that's fine.

There's a key point about the worldview I advocate, that you are probably missing. You seem to be all wrapped up in analysis of outcomes as the primary motivator for things: how will the highways get built, etc. Now, while I believe that a world built entirely on voluntary collaboration and exchange in a free market will result - on average - in better outcomes anyway, that's not the goal. The goal is, simply, freedom. In my worldview, and the worldview of quite a few others, freedom is its own end.

So, rather than discouraging people from acting recklessly, we should depend on them to anticipate every possible issue?

Not at all. The goal is to avoid the initiation of force to accomplish political ends, no matter how noble they may seem. If some entity (whether it calls itself "government" or something else) wants to issue a guidline saying "always use your headlights" and if 99.9999999999% of people do so, because it's common sense anyway, that's fine. Somebody (or multiple somebodies) could issue whole books full of guidelines, most of which might look a lot like the statutory regulations we have today... the difference in what I propose is that we remove the sanction of "use of force" to require adherence to those guidelines, and rely on the effect of "strict liability for the consequences of ones actions" as the motivator for following them.

It isn't just illegal to not have headlights. It's also illegal to not use them at appropriate times. This is why we need 'lame statutory laws', because some asshole will always think they've found a loophole.

What you just said is almost completely irrelevant to the point I was making, and - if anything - just supports it. Requiring headlights to be installed is pointless because Joe Dumbass can simply choose not to run them, whether it's "illegal" or not. And, as before, if Joe Dumbass drives 100 miles without headlights for whatever reason and no one is injured, there is no reasonable basis to say a crime has been committed.

The whole libertarian view is a vast over-simplification of the role of a government.

One could just as easily make the claim that "the whole statist / collectivist view is a vast over-statement of the role of a government."

In a representative democracy, such as the one you live in, we've decided that elected officials (not some big, bad, faceless State) should do this work for us,

No, we didn't decide. I certainly didn't decide that I want this batch of "elected official" to represent me. Let's not pretend that "voting" makes everything OK or that democracy is anything other than a euphemism for mob rule and the tyranny of the majority.

I suspect you could easily consume your entire life digesting and considering every decision the government makes. We call that 'politics'. ... so we can do what we're good at, which isn't making complicated decisions about trade and subsidies and taxes and such.

Delegating certain decisions is fine, although decisions about a lot of the things you're talking about probably shouldn't be made by any centralized entity at all. Market forces are sufficient... It's a marker of incredible conceit for anyone to think that we can appoint some small group of people to manage something like a national economy, and actually expect them to be able to receive, process and act on, enough information (in a timely enough fashion) to actually make good decisions. It's actually quite an absurd notion.