There have been, of course, a variety of governmental forms across human history ranging from the autocratic to the more "democratic". Governments of the more republican variety, can and have served as countervailing forces against the massive power of corporate and consumer capitalism, which has dominated the US and the world since the American Gilded Age. That, however, is not and never has been their only function states or governments, particularly those of the republican variety, perform. They also provide services. The Roman state, for instance, provided its plebs with bread and circuses. The feudal state provided serfs and peasants with protection in exchange for agricultural stay in place labour. The Canadian state provides public services, including health care and retirement pensions, among other things to its citizens that are, again at least in theory, of a non-commercial character.
Economic corporations, which are clearly more powerful than corporate governments, operate in the private not the public interest. They operate for the personal enrichment of a few individuals rather than for the public good. A republican form of government, at least in theory, operates for the greatest good of the greatest number of citizens, I say citizens, by the way, since modern nations are not the product of a bunch of mythic monads but are made up of real individual citizens.
Too many on the uberindividualistic or hyperindividualistic right, embedded as they are in myths rather than realities, don't recognise, first, that corporate power, which is hierarchical and bureaucratic, far exceeds the power of governments. In fact, corporate capitalists control not only the means of production but control many if not all government functions and use these to enhance their own power and and their own profits. Second, those on the right don't recognise the difference between autocratic forms of government and republican forms of governance. Many on the right, in other words, have no conception of historical realities and that there really is a difference between electoral forms of governance and governance based on the autocratic whims of an individual.
In America's current form all the right wing utopia of downsizing government will do, will enhance the private corporate power of the wealthy and rich few, just as it has done in the past, at the expense of non-elite citizens. If you want to increase freedom, in other words, you cannot simply eliminate or downsize modern governmental bureaucratic-hierarchical forms but you must also eliminate or massively downsize economic bureaucratic-hierarchical forms. That means that you have to radically break up corporate forms of the governmental AND the economic variety. And this means that you have to not only radically downsize states and particularly the war making powers of states, since, as history shows, economic and political bureaucracies thrive and expand under such conditions, you also have to radically down size economic bureaucracies.
Personally I don't see this happening. Karl Marx's somewhat anarchistic left libertarian notion that communism will lead not only to the freedom to fish in the morning, work a few hours to meet needs in the afternoon, and then philosophise in the evening, and to the withering away of the state, seems to me like a utopian dream, as utopian a dream that corporate capitalism will bring everyone to heavenly nirvana. All corporate capitalism does is enrich the few and here in the States it is the economic few who have control of the government apparatus, such control that they are able to eliminate laws protecting citizens from casino and vulture capitalism and to put taxpayers on the hook for the results of this speculative casino, periodic economic bust. In the meantime perhaps reforms like those proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are the best we can hope for in a world dominated by corporate capitalist elites.
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