Hey look! the FBI and NSA are data-mining and analyzing your data!

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Skybird

In principle in the way you deal with people in your life without the state needing to tell you how to do it (although it regulates your life more and more).

The problem I think that is happening here is that you are not introducing a first step into the subject. It's a bit like saying to someone who wants to know why the earth moves that they should read a thesis by Stephen Hawking. Furthermore the method in which you put forward this thesis is borderline fanatical, comparable to fundamentalist preachers and extremist Imams in its ferocity and vehemence.
Sure, it's good to be passionate about a subject, but brow-beating people from a pulpit of righteousness that your cause is just and the only true way...well, makes you sound a lot like some of the people that you have argued against in the past in different threads.

Putting this to one side, and coming back to the point at hand. What you describe, in essence, is the state of mankind in the days around the Neolithic era, when it boiled down to small local settlements which spawned new settlements off each other like buds from a plant. Eventually this collective group of settlements pooled their resources to form a nation, it may not have been done peacefully, it most likely was done through force, but there was strength in numbers against both disease, other settlements and predators. It enabled them to do greater things, to pool their knowledge and basically lead to where we are today, through a few thousand years.
There is a reason, a real reason, that we don't live that way any more, and it's got little to do with government greed, although certainly there is a factor in that, because after all government is made up of perfectly ordinary people just like you and me, but a need for collective strength.
I would put money on, if it still existed, the likelihood that any attempt to split a state into seperate individual states would eventually result in the reunification of those states into one larger entity. You can deregulate, transfer powers, like devolution in the United Kingdom, but somewhere along the line the buck has to stop, there has to be one entity which decides the collective direction of a nation, be it a King, President, Fuhrer, General Secretary, Ayatollah, anyone, that central figure has to exist to interact with the figures from other nations, even if it's only a figurehead and the real business is done by the worker-ants underneath them.
Yes, the current democracy is bloated, and yes it is probably quite corrupt, but you show me one governmental system in this planets history that has NOT suffered from corruption of some sort in its existence, and lasted longer than a year.
Furthermore, and here's the real kicker, any one nation that is dissolved into a collection of smaller states, will almost immediately be overrun by its neighbours, because it will be unable to form proper resistance without a central organisation, each individual militia will be fighting a separate battle against a unified army, so unless those militia have someone rich and power backing them, they will be kicked around by the unified force and destroyed.
Things throughout history happen for a reason, civilization evolves for a reason, right now democracy seems to be the government of choice, five hundred years ago it was monarchy, ninety years ago everyone was convinced that communism and socialism was the answer. Perhaps through some sort of giant war or ecological disaster Hoppes work will come to fruition, I don't deny that should the planets population be reduced by three quarters of its current size then governmental types would have to rapidly evolve to suit the situation, and unless communications were swiftly restored between nations then there would be a break-up of states across the globe, because civilizations adapt, they have to, or they die.
Sure, it makes for some good fiction to have a civil war in America, Texas is independent, California tries to become the new Athens and instead becomes Rome post-visigoths, the Monroe Republic rules with an iron fist (yeah, I've seen some episodes of it, and no, I'm not impressed by it) or Cheyenne rules through subterfuge (much better imho), but each of those works of fiction require a major catastrophe to take place to break the current situation. No amount of links, posts, tirades, sermons or judgement on an internet forum is going to create the sort of catastrophe required to break up a nation.
I, too, am disillusioned with the current political system in the United Kingdom, and a tad fearful of the one in America, here in the UK everyone has taken the middle ground and there is little difference between the parties, in America the middle ground has been napalmed and both sides are flying off the opposite ends of the spectrum, neither system particularly works, however I would much rather live under a democracy than under a system that, by typing these words, I am automatically picked up in the early hours of the morning by a policeman and spend the rest of my short life in a prison cell.
Sure, there are some circumstances in a democracy at the moment that can cause this to occur, and at the moment, they usually involve Islam, and now surely, Skybird, you cannot call for greater security against Islamic extremists on one hand, and decry increased government surveillance on another. It just doesn't work that way.