I'm sure you were taught that Justinian, but it's a lie belied by the experience of the United States itself. Denied organized police, our small cities policed themselves. Denied the military, our communities armed themselves. The development of college-trained, permanent, paid police and firefighters and schoolteachers is still so recent that it is living memory. There are people still alive who were born in states without public schools but learned to read. You know how 24HrFitness is a private company that survives by selling subscriptions? That's how most Americans bought education.
You mentioned contracts law as one of the "basic" needs served by government. For the first 170 years of our Republic, every state had its own contract law. In cases of interstate commerce, federal judges developed rules to determine which state law would apply in various situations-- the buyers, the sellers, the shippers, the insurers. It was not until the 1950s that lawyers, law professors, retired judges and manufacturers got enough political juice to sell the Uniform Commercial Code to various state governments, and even then, it's been adopted piecemeal. The effort to create the basic laws of contract for the protection of commerce, came from private citizens.
Same thing with Underwriter Laboratories, that guarantees appliances are safe from electrical fire. Same with the NAASD, that develops quality standards for metallurgy. Same for rocketry. Saying that it is helpful or useful for expert private sector regulation to be adopted by government and expanded nationally is one thing; saying that absent Uncle Sucker we would be apemen is ridiculous. The American economy produced 33% of agricultural product and 70% of the steel in the world by 1890, and government services of the time would best be described as registration rather than regulation.
We are living the results of central planning -- we declare our pride in social justice and fairness, and we'd rather wallow with 1/3 of adult Americans out of the workplace than allow some people to make a bundle embarrassing our politicians by leading us out of the wilderness. Washington will not resolve the recession. Washington is too concerned with seeing all their important friends make it. They are crippling alternatives. They are stifling economic innovation because it will not follow the appropriate political channels.
The core joke of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is that of course no civilization would develop personal computers with instant remote database recovery, and then waste this technology to find good drinks.
Steve Jobs has ruined this joke.
