A government that is incapable of destroying non-state coercive actors is as harmful to the cause of freedom as a coercive State.

Persuasion and coercion are mutually exclusive. Freedom to persuade does include freedom to persuade by coercion. It also does not include persuasion for coercion. The armchair ideologue who preaches coercion is as guilty of coercion as one who coerces after such "peaceful" persuasion.

Rule of law is the grey area between the two extremes, viz. the moral norm of individual liberty and state coercion. When it is at the former end, it is anarchy; when at the latter, it is totalitarian repressive state. In the real world, every state operates somewhere between these two extremes. Democracies have to place restrictions on individual liberty to prevent a descent into anarchy; dictators have to provide a modicum of individual freedom to prevent desperate rebellion.

Democratic State has an obligation to protect the weak; anarchy thrives on the weakness and helplessness of the weak. A democratic State that does not protect the weak from unlawful coercion and from hunger invites its own doom and creates space for anarchy.

Democratic State exists to support freedom from unlawful coercion and to ensure that perpetrators of such unlawful coercion are coerced by law to conform to the law.