Individual and the State

I believe that you must separate the economic sphere from the social sphere. There are many thinkers like Milton Friedman (in Capitalism and Freedom) who merge both issues together and this forces you to have all or nothing solutions. When you merge both spheres together, you must then say government is either good and can interfere in everything or government is evil and can interfere in nothing. This is counter-productive to progress and understanding. It doesn't allow for the (sometimes important) in-betweens and grey areas.

There are issues that overlap such as eminent domain (private property). Some people believe you have things, they are yours and no one can take that away (this would be a classical liberal idea). However, under modern social-democratic thinking, things can be taken if it is for the public good. For example, using an area for a bridge or subway system which helps with commerce but may take away someone's house in the short term. We do compensate people for this (or they should be!).

In most cases, there is significant separation. Do not kill people is not an economic issue, for example. This is a human rights issue.

If we assume we can elect competent people to iron out the kinks we can separate the spheres and deal with the cases where things are unclear or overlap because dealing with these things is inevitable and reality since these situations exist. When it comes to issues of individual rights in the social sphere (let's say anything in Bill of Rights, Universal Declaration of Human Rights) then the government should not impinge on the things dealt with in those documents. When it comes to the economic sphere, anything to deal directly with money and property can be decided collectively by the representative government to tax properly for the greater good of all. You cannot apply these laws in a way that is likely to cause harm. Harm can be defined as material harm here. In terms of taxes, when applied correctly they do not cause injury (proper taxing on the wealthiest for example) or harm. But again, judiciousness is needed. In this example, you would not want this tax on the whole of society where it would harm those in the lower income brackets. This is an illustration of sensible limits decided by society and society's elected representatives in government.

Blindly following either ideology in terms of Mills or Marx would potentially not be best for society as shown in the examples above.

A state which blindly follows a policy of non-government interference in all matters will be a state that collapses in on itself due to the inability to perform collective action. More precisely an example would be the requirement that people are protected from force. In today's world, this means you need a well funded military and to do this you need government interference in terms of taxation. Additionally, you need protection from force domestically which also requires government interference. Non-government interference is not realistic or even an ideal to strive towards to have a healthy state. That would be a non-state (anarcho-capitalism for example) and will not last. In a non-state anyone can then label themselves as the state due to their unwillingness to go by the ideals set out (which will always inevitably happen in any system, not everyone will be on-board with the system 100%).