Useful physical objects: not known to just disappear.
Human minds were not created to handle the scope of what modern democratic or representative governments have become, and politicians are not made of more robust intellectual material than anyone else, and certainly no more robust moral material. There’s too many moving parts and moving parts within those moving parts for a group of oligarchs to maintain a sense of what’s going on. Free market economists relate this concept to their studies by calling it a “fatal conceit“—knowledge and expertise about things is too dispersed for it to be centrally controlled, and the fatal conceit is the phenomenon that those in power assume the proper accumulation of relevant knowledge to craft “effective policy,” which is state-speak for “the most productive direction to point our guns.”
The point is, in certain circumstances, like America’s, the collapse of the government won’t mean much to people. We can go on living our lives and deal with issues that come up, and the people that have become attached to their precious state will have to resolve it internally as they would the death of a loved one. But practically speaking little will change in their actual lives, because government collapse does not equal social or economic collapse: roads will somehow be built, security will somehow be provided, the food will somehow end up on plates—all assuming there is a demand for it in the first place. Or something may come along that will render technology once used by governments obsolete and unwanted. The demand for whale fat fell dramatically when the light bulb was produced.
Don’t ask me how. I only know how to design a usable website and write with some lucidity. But think about it: there’s millions of people in this country (and even more in other countries, so I’m told) that will be the same person tomorrow if the government vanished overnight. I’m sure someone, somewhere will figure out a way to solve a problem. It’s not rocket science, unless you’re launching rockets—which you don’t need a government to do.
The further point is, all of the resources that the government owns—buildings, vehicles, weapons, computers, politicians with a salvageable skill for the real world. Stuff doesn’t just disappear. All these things go somewhere. Where do they go?
Images of non-disappearing objects stolen from Internet websites.