The state is bad — wasteful, inefficient, and incompetent — at almost everything it tries to do. There are two exceptions that I can think of:
- First, making war, which is the application of violence against the citizens of another state.
- Second, prosecuting crimes, which is the application of violence against its own citizens.
If it doesn’t have to do with the use or threatened use of force, government stinks at it. (Whether government should be in the business of doing things that it does badly is a separate question. I would say that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.)