Whitehead can't give up on the idea that "we" can have good government. No surprise because he's a lawyer. Every government that has ever been was evil because it existed by stealing money from strangers. Whether Whitehead likes it or not, "we" live the best part of our lives as anarchists. If we lived all of our lives as anarchists, "government" would disappear through lack of interest, and the Whiteheads of the world would have nothing to complain about.

"Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a Great Leap Forward that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children. In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy's mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state's mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous." ~Robert Higgs