[SteveA]

Though people can feel an obligation to others, I see people as often mistaken in what they assume others are obligated to do.

Here's the crux of the problem from my view. There are many different ideas of what an ideal society is. A long time ago we might have had a more homogeneous society but even then it varied in different areas of the country and from person to person as well.

Consider this:

Religious view: "If only everyone would follow the specific beliefs of my denomination, the world would be peaceful, ethical/moral and we'd all go to heaven or have 70 virgins etc."

Communist view: "If only everyone would work together and share the results of this, there would be no poverty"

Socialist view: "If only everyone would allow a few wise and benevolent people to run our economy, we could avoid unneeded competition in the markets"

etc.

These are just some general categories but there are plenty of other subsets of these (drugs, families, sexual orientation, retirement, education, property rights etc.) and entirely alternate views on what a good or ideal society would look like.

Probably any one of these ideas could work just fine between people who truly supported the same or similar ideal. The problem is trying to make everyone use the same model.

On a small scale, there are successful examples of peaceful religious communities, as well as example of communes operating by communistic principles, or businesses that effectively employ socialism to manage production etc.

This difference is that these ideas operate on a voluntary basis in these communities and people are free to leave, or can even be "exiled" from these associations when they aren't supportive of it.

It's when the thinking changes to:

"People must follow my personal religious denominations point of views"

"People must share their property"

"People must follow the "wise" leader I selected"

that these institution begin to fail.

When everyone is on-board and behind an effort, it can succeed. Motivation and desire are probably the largest factors in determining what a person does. People who believe they can force people to create some ideal against their desires will simply relearn that these efforts not only create ongoing conflict but rarely produce the desired result either.

I think libertarian views address this very well by simply protecting the freedom people should have to join whichever of these endeavors they desire to support. They are sort of the lowest common denominator for what government should do, that most everyone agree with, and that people free to add whatever else they want privately between people that desire to add greater complexity to it.

By doing this, we'd find that though many people didn't feel government did enough, in their view, the functions that it did perform would be things few people disagreed with. And they'd be free to add societies with greater "social obligations" voluntarily between people with similar views of the details, in a peaceful and prosperous fashion.