The government is the ultimate safeguard for a whole society, where it should be the steward of common-action when individual action can't be trusted on due to a combination of perverse incentives and issues arising from the tragedy of the commons.

Without that you have an anarchic lawless society where individualism can flourish and people can exploit whatever they want without regards for the 2nd, 3rd, n-th order impact that an action might cause unto others, because it's invisible or severely hidden to them. Or that they simply don't care about said impact because their personal reward is worth more to them than the benefit of society as a whole.