Governments are product of evolution. If they were as ineffective as anarchists claim they wouldn't exist.
Ineffective at what is the question. They are certainly ineffective at what I'd like them to do, that is, providing base necessities.
All notions of "most humans are egoists" are just libertarian propaganda.
What kind of libertarian?
@debate about altruism:
Social Darwinism hides everywhere.
We are talking about our concrete lives, not the potential lives of fifty generations in the future.
I don't know about most people, but I, personally, do feel very bad about homelessness, war, famine and stuff like that. Whether me caring about that stuff makes it more likely that I have much offspring in fifty generations is of no consequence to me. That's abstract, far away, inconsequential to my life. What is of consequence is that I walk past several homeless people almost every day, war is a daily occurrence and while it's not directly affecting me it still manages to make me feel bad.
And, judging by how people around me act, my feelings are not unusual. We, as humans, evolved to care about other humans. We do have empathy. There are many people who pretend that they somehow untrained their empathy and are happier due to that, but frankly, to me those existences seem mostly much poorer than my own. Maybe I'm just arrogant. I don't know.
Ignoring our feelings just because they might mean an evolutionary disadvantage is counterproductive to your own well-being and seemingly also counterproductive to your evolutionary success, if you take a look at the kind of destruction that attitude is causing.
This is still egoism and it might still fit into homo economicus. The point is that empathy is often falsely (I think) seen as a liability instead of a part of humans. It defines us and satisfying your consciousness is actually necessary for your well-being, just like food, water, sex, attention, love and all of that stuff.
@Sergarr:
The existence of society depends on your perspective, which is just another way of saying that it's subjective. It can be a useful abstraction, but sometimes it gets in the way of seeing things properly.