Think about all of the social issues out there. Don't just do the ones in the media. Expand your perspective to ones that the media hasn't necessarily thought of bring to the public's attention.
Now, ask yourself if the government should be involved. If it should have any involvement, how much?
If you had difficulty actually imagining an issue in which the government simply has no role, nothing to say, no jurisdiction, one where you could tell the government to piss off and leave you alone, you've just proved something about modern life. That property of modern life is that it is totalitarian.
Our disagreement isn't whether or not the government has a role here or there, but merely how much. Modern society debates whether society should be squeezed by a rough hand in a gauntlet of steel or a soft hand in a velvet glove.
This is why I have come to be skeptical about mainstream libertarianism which is as much a social movement as it is a political movement. Mainstream libertarians see little separation between politics and civil society as they perceive a battlefield that stretches from City Hall and D.C. to the living room in terms of power dynamics, relationships and attitudes among family members. It is a continuum, not a separation wherein politics has only a naturally limited, legitimate role in forming society and social issues are frequently incestuously mingled with political issues.
If a free society can be genuinely recreated in America, the totalitarian mindset of the modern, secular West must be broken and politics must be neatly compartmentalized and limited even down to how we see authority distributed throughout society. This means we must restore the balance of competing social institutions which have their own legitimate authority which the state dare not tread but in the most serious of circumstances lest it be rejected as an usurper.
This will require a more conservative understanding of human nature and the limits of human civilization. The process of nurturing competing social institutions requires an understanding of their natures and needs that only a thoughtful, intellectual conservatism more in the line of Bill Buckley than Rush Limbaugh can provide. For some of us, this will mean admitting that our libertarian tendencies must be limited to the realm of politics while our greater worldview is conservative. It is clear on balance that a far-reaching libertarianism is no more balanced and in line with human nature than socialism.
A lesson in totalitarianism:
Most american will unquestioningly obey anyone in a police uniform. Most people in police uniforms expect that behavior and get violent when they don't see it, even if they have no legal basis for their demands and even if they have no legal basis for wearing a police uniform.
I raise for you the example of University Police. Universities are not municipalities and are not entitled under most state statutes to constitute their own police forces. They have no juristictions, no court rooms, prisons, investigators or prosecutors. Yet they issue monetary fines and expect them to be paid, under penalty of expulsion. They have the same legal status as private security guards, yet at least two universities have their own SWAT teams.
I wrote to the University of Richmond about their own statutory authenticity. They have not responded. I suspect they cannot back up their assertion that they are "real police".
I'm thinking that if a free society were to return to America, it will be because authority has been returned to the individual and individual families and stripped from the State.
I don't see how a "competing social institution" could wield any power/authority over anyone other than its members, who are members of that institution by consent.