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But in principle, isn't "the State" what organically arises from the latter arrangements scaling up and coming to rely on common record-keeping infrastructure to reduce friction cost for all involved?
It starts with a tribe or a village. Old Greybeard is a font of good advice, so of course, everyone chips in to get him some fruit and cured meat in the winter. And maybe they do the same for Old Bald Bastard who curses out anyone who comes near his hut; no one likes him, but… the current best hunter's pretty cranky too, and he isn't stupid. If he sees that O.B.B.'s left to rot, he'll leave the tribe in the lurch and look for some place where he can expect better rewards for his years of good service once his teeth start to fall out. Wait a few generations. The village gets bigger - now there are a lot of old mouths that a majority of townsfolk wants to see fed for one reason or another, but it would just be inefficient to collect separate donations for each old geezer individually. So a guy takes it upon himself to collect bulk donations from each household, and divide them up equally to all the elders. So far so good.
Except, what if it turns out there's another guy doing the same thing for contributions to the town bridge-building budget, and yet a third guy who collects the money for the town watchmen to buy themselves weapons they use to defend the whole community? Not only is this more work for everyone, but some of the less well-off households keep having to explain that they can't give to the Elders Feeding Fund because they already gave all their spare grain to the Soldiers Feeding Fund. Pretty soon, everyone agrees it's more convenient for those guys to work together and create a single list, and for each household to make one donation a year, that gets divided up between the different useful community functions.
All perfectly sensible, but suddenly you have something that looks an awful lot like taxes and social welfare.
Presumably your libertarian alarm bells start going off at the step in all this where it stops being optional for a given household to give to the "charitable" fund. Now, I would personally say that it's fair enough of the majority to take the trade-off of "a given household can no longer opt out of the yearly donations without leaving the tribe altogether; but in exchange the collection process will be (relatively) hassle-free for everyone". Of course, I can respect the classic ethical objection - "coerced giving is theft, end of story, it doesn't matter if it's more 'efficient'". But it sounded more like you were concerned about the overall inefficiency of government intervention than taking a principled stand against taxation even at the cost of potentially suboptimal outcomes. And if that's your position, then... I don't think it's coherent. Every step I outlined is just a rational iteration upon the previous status quo, making things smoother and more efficient for everyone. The solutions you advocate aren't really an alternative to a social welfare state. They amount to little more than doing social welfare in patchy, inefficient ways while depriving yourself of the centralized record-keeping tool which thousands of years of cultural evolution created for exactly this purpose: the State.
(There is obviously a conversation to be had about novel and grievous failure modes that arise when you scale our little town-sized setup all the way to a polity of 350 million people. Hell, I sometimes wonder if on some level this isn't just a basically insane thing to even attempt. Maybe the Ancient Greek-style city-state is the maximum size at which you can really run any state properly, and we could fix the world's ills by giving all regional metropolises total fiscal independence. Even if you're really doomer-pilled about full-sized, modern governments, however, I think the above argument still illuminates the fact that it's not uniquely strange or sinister for Big Government to try and screw up attempts like the one you describe to create "mutual support networks". Fundamentally, that's just the perfectly healthy reaction of an established State trying to nip de facto secession in the bud; no State, good or bad, can tolerate the creation of a rogue mini-State within itself.)
The founding fathers presaged this and wrote The Federalist Papers specifically to address it.
TLDR; Far, far more power should be delegated to states and localities. This is what the tenth amendment says. Like, lit-ra-lly;
The cascading usurpation of this began with the 14th amendment and then was wildly expanded by the Civil Rights Act. Strange how that lines up with the cultural revolution of the 1960s, ya?
You now - or, until recently - had Offices of Civil Rights in almost every executive agency who's express job was to try and find the hidden racisms in ... anything ... so that some sort of amorphous yet far reaching suit could be brought in federal court.
And, of course, any congress person who would voice a concern with the 1964 CRA, despite the fact that his metastasized multiple times in every decade since its original passage would instantly bet met with breathless cries of "the racisms!".
All of this is to repeat the apocryphal story about Ben Franklin;
And, slowly, over time, under the cover of "righteous intent", we've decided to abandon the republic in favor of a centralized capital-S State that reaches down to wrap it's
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I’m not even a huge libertarian. I think that theft is a perfectly valid way of acquiring wealth, society to society. That’s what conquest is, after all, and I think conquest is a perfectly valid way for nations to go about dealing with each other. Internally in a society, theft will destroy it, but that’s just ingroup/outgroup dynamics at the vast scale of peoples and nations. Externally, it can improve it dramatically, ergo all the IP theft that China does, and which young America did a fair amount of from the British. The non-aggression principle is incoherent.
This is more like where I am. Technology probably lets us have sleek, attentive and relatively homogeneous polities bigger than Ancient Athens, but the reality is that I know jack shit about New York and so, in a perfect world, my opinion about what they get up to over there should be completely impotent to change anything there. And of course, vice versa. Patchy, inefficient ways are better.
Also, Big Government doesn’t need to be strange or sinister. Plenty of bad decisions are made by the smartest people with the best intentions. They just need to be wrong and do their damndest to prevent any possible alternative from ever arising. All of which can be done out of the purest hearts.
Well, amen to that - but I got the impression from your OP that you were presenting government interference as a kind of aberration, that the State's interference in things like the mooted mutual-support-network-of-elderly-bachelors was inherently overreach and not the proper purpose of the State. In contrast, then, I was arguing that providing this kind of service is exactly the purpose of a state, and squashing internal competition comes hand in hand with that. In this framing, we might say that a given government - say, the 21st century US Gov - has grown so cancerous and counterproductive that it ought, at this point, to be circumvented and replaced from within; but statements like "The State shouldn’t even be perceived as 'leaving you to rot' in your old age" still come across as self-contradictory. If it were functional the State absolutely ought to deal with that sort of thing, in fact that is exactly what it means for it to be "the State"; it just might be the case that it's so bad at it currently that it ought to be prevented from fulfilling this natural purpose.
Also, side-track, but:
Well, now, I wouldn't go that far. It's not optimal for national flourishing, but then, no one ever said morality had to conveniently be isomorphic to the optimal strategies for material success. It may be (whether because God wishes to test His children on virtues orthogonal to profit maximization, or because there is no God) that doing the ethical thing leads to material ruin - that doesn't ipso facto prove it isn't the ethical thing.
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