Ask people to identify the essential, rock-bottom functions for which a government is needed, and most of them will end-up with the military, police, courts, and prisons.
Look at the god-awful job that almost every government does with these responsibilities. Look at the god-awful job that the American governments do with these responsibilities. Governments do a genuinely horrifying job with what are ostensibly their most basic responsibilities.
And yet people are constantly looking to the government to get involved in other areas, often areas of great delicacy. And when things in those areas subsequently get worse, those people think that the solution is still more government involvement.
That's just insane, actively insane.