Maggie's Farm

And yet historically, without a military defense provided by a nation-state, there could not be farmers.

I don't think it's so much a question of causation as of whether a debt is created, and if so from whom to whom. Even we libertarian types believe that a government performs functions essential to material prosperity, such as ensuring law and order and the predictability on which markets thrive. That doesn't mean that free markets must keep paying and paying more and more into government, or that government should expand its sphere of influence as much as it likes and then charge everyone for the privilege of putting up with it.

Our biggest problem is the increasing tendency to collect taxes from half the population in order to redistribute money to the other half. If we were all paying more equally for government, we'd more easily come to a consensus about how much of it there should be, and how big a slice of the economic pie it should eat. I also think there's a terrible tendency to equate all cooperative activity with government. Most cooperative activity and should proceed by consent -- that is, via private institutions. Only those public functions that require force should be ceded to government, and very few public functions worth keeping should require force.