To have a free market, you need a government, if only for 2 things: enforcing contracts, and defining and enforcing private property (yes, defining: you need to

To have a free market, you need a government, if only for 2 things: enforcing contracts, and defining and enforcing private property (yes, defining: you need to decide what to do with the not-at-all-obvious kinds of "intellectual" property, such as copyright, patents, and trademarks.). And to do just that, you need some kind of system, which will need people to run it. Full-time civil servants (that means taxes), or part-time volunteers, something. Oh, and while we're at it, since our world revolves a lot around money we should define and enforce a monetary policy: who gets to create and destroy the money, and how. And by the way, people are not fully informed, perfectly rational agents that can solve NP-complete programs in polynomial time. You will have market failures, and will probably need a way to deal with them as they come up. (Not dealing with them at all is also an option, but then, natural monopolies may eventually grow into Super-corporations, Neuromancer style —not the best kind of governance if you ask me). While we may not need the kind of government we have right now, we do need some kind of governance. Because if you have none, well… the world won't dissolve into chaos, but some forms of governance will emerge anyway, and they won't be of your choosing.