Good comments.

The most successful corporations do take a long view. If you look at the record, companies who look only at the short-term bottom line are soon overtaken by smarter competitors. History is full of large corporations that have fossilized and been rendered nearly irrelevant by smaller competitors who leapfrogged them. When I was younger, it was assumed that huge corporations like IBM, General Motors, Sears, Polaroid, and many other "blue chips" pretty much ruled the world. It is highly instructive to compare the list of blue chip stocks of the 1960s to the blue chip stocks of today. Or the Fortune 500 lists of the two decades. Not only are damn few 1960s stocks still on the lists, most of the new ones are in industries that didn't even exist in 1960. Creative destruction.

In my opinion, the Center for Disease Control could be considered part of the defense organization, even if only domestic. In our modern world, it certainly would be.

Second, especially as the population grows there is a need for regulation of actions. The US doesn't have a culture which promotes respect for each other the way the Japanese do. I think we need Stop signs, red lights, green lights and uniform roads (couldn't be built without the doctrine of "Eminent Domain", by the way). There's no way to establish those if the role of government is only to protect from "force or fraud".

My point is that organization or cooperation to achieve common goals need not require a government gun. Even the Japanese have traffic lights. There is no reason to assume that a private road system wouldn't have strict rules of behavior, just like any private store or restaurant. Whether "eminent domain" is required to create any reasonable infrastructure is certainly arguable, and is not a simple question. I submit that the admittedly greater difficulty of obtaining property by free consent might still be preferable to the massive abuses that emininent domain has inflicted on citizens standing in the way of road or development projects that are often politically-motivated.

And, I was wrong, those are a good thing. No money in them, though. The government couldn't establish them under the "force or fraud" limitations.

Please pay attention. I established that many pollution rules can be addressed as crimes against property, and usually are by libertarians.

A fire department operating on a subscription basis ain't a good idea.

A fire department as one part of an insurance company might be. There are other options as well, most of which include provisions for the poor or non-subscribers.

There are damn few things that our government is currently doing that could not be done privately. Maybe differently, but still done.

The objective is to start in that direction, however slowly. I think even you agree that our current situation needs change.

Young bureaucracies are great. Old bureaucracies are hidebound, overridden with rules, regulations, paperwork. Every bureaucracy needs to be disbanded, with the functions handed off to another new one every 10 years or so.

This obviously applies to governments as well. Some of my more cynical friends think a revolution is required every so often just to clear out the deadwood.