As people get older, we sometimes hear them joke that it beats the alternative, which is usually left unsaid.

There’s another sense in which the alternative is assumed to be far worse than one’s present condition: The type of government almost all people live under, which is the state, here used in the Max Weber sense of an entity successfully claiming a “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” As bad as states might be — the argument goes — it certainly beats the alternative, anarchy.

Earlier this year, Anna Hershberger had the cops called on her because she let two of her kids—ages five and almost seven—walk outside with a trash bag and pick up litter unsupervised. The cop who showed up didn’t arrest Hershberger but did warn her that something terrible could have happened to her children.

Among the many practical issues facing anarchism there is one that attracts the biggest amount of criticism from minarchists: the size of a community. They point out that we do not live in a Hutterite or Anglo-Saxon but urban and global society. As such, size matters. As a settlement grows larger, libertarianism becomes harder to enforce as a covenant. Small communities are easily formed outside the urban matrix, they are not easily sustained on an economic level.

Chances are that many families and friends gathering for Thanksgiving dinner this year will gather at some point in a room called the “dining room.” For most middle-class Americans, maintaining a formal dining room for ritualized forms of entertainment popular decades ago is no longer especially popular. Yet most homes still have a room separate from the kitchen for meals with larger gatherings or for when the entire immediate family assembles.

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