historycircus

I like the OP's statement of purpose, but offer this caveat.

I am not sure that a future "without government" is possible. When populations begin to rise, organization is needed. Several times in our collective past we have been without government, and they have been times where gross individualism has cheapened life. Philosophers have debated the necessity of government since recorded history. Plato had his Aristotle. Thomas Hobbes had his Locke.

Locke's arguments make sense to me. He argued humans are inherently good in a state of nature, but government is a necessary evil. There will always be those who seek to assert their individual wants against the interests of humanity (i.e., greed, crime, etc.), and governments, ideally, help mitigate abuse. But governments, if left unchecked and neglected by the people, will become abusive and totalitarian. After all, "government" is not an entity with a life of its own - it is run by humans, and as such, can be subject to the same negative stuff mentioned above. That is why republicanism and democracy were praised in the period of the American Revolution. Ideally, the government would serve to efficiently organize resources for society, and provide a check on the unruly mob. Likewise, when government became abusive, the unruly mob would provide a check on the government.

As long as we remain human beings, there will be those who seek to assert their own individual needs over the rest of us. Like it or not, whatever is coming down the pike for us will not selectively weed out all the bad folks and leave only the good. The more of us there are, the harder it becomes to balance private and public interests with each other. Government structures are a solution there - even if everyone in the future becomes enlightened, service-to-others oriented, there is one more issue to consider: the environment.

We have already brought our planet to the brink of calamity, and we will undoubtedly have to practice a resource-use efficiency that has never existed before if we want to survive as a species. A collective, regulatory structure for efficient resource use will be necessary to preserve what little is left of nature's delicate balance.

Government need not be bad; I think we think of it negatively because it has become pretty terrible over the last few decades. I think government has its place, and I also think it is impractical, and possibly dangerous, to assume that all people will work for the common good all of the time. In an ideal world, government would not be necessary. But we, as a species, too often fail to live up to such ideals.