who needs crime when you have friends like the state?

I came across a short, but insightful passage from a LewRockwell.com articles titled Does Government Protect Us? by Anthony Gregory:

The state now seizes about half the wealth in the country. Does it not seem odd that the organization claiming to protect our lives and livelihoods needs to expropriate an entire half of our resources to do so? And what is it protecting us from, again? Could private criminals on their own really steal the trillions of dollars in wealth consumed annually by the bureaucracy, kidnap as many innocents as the police state, and kill as many as the federal war machine? To ask the question is to answer it.

If I'd relate this to a statist, the most like response I'd get would be "Yeah, but if there was no government, criminals and warlords would take all your wealth" or "If you don't like it here, why don't you go to [insert some other abusive government here]".

What I really can't understand is why people have a tendency to believe the worst in others, as though if not for our benevolent government master, we would be tearing out each others eyes and throats, and so the expropriation of only half our wealth in return is too good a bargain to pay for this arrangement.

I do however have a strong feeling that this ingrained distrust and fear of others is due to our present state conditioning, which trains us to form into primitive bands of savages who employ acts of political plunder to survive, and the perverse notion that this method is even the most noble of acts!

Is it really any surprise that when people are politically pitted against each other, they will quickly look into irrational differences, such as gender, racism, religion in order to 'rationalize' their intolerable positions? Even while these irrational notions may arise on their own in the non-political sphere, they tend to be corrected, as the grocery store owner that refuses a black customers patronage will soon learn the better that it benefits no one to foster such irrational beliefs of superiority premised upon the genealogical heritage of another person.

In short, the state profits when we bicker, as this is a self-fulfilling dystopia which only lends further credence to the organization which tells us constantly that we can't be trusted to live together peacefully, and thus we are subject to their good-hearted protection.