(responding to the school of thought you are referencing) "might makes right" school of political realism never made sense for me in a domestic context.

the relationship of the state to the citizen at the citizen's birth is completely one directional: the state provides infrastructure, security, and economic activity while expecting nothing in return until much later in a person's life-- and if the person doesn't ever proffer anything in return to the state, that doesn't guarantee violence against the individual, nor exclusion from services.

if the platonic form of a state were that it has to be a mafia of sorts reliant on the threat of physical force, it'd quickly go extinct for lack of younger replacements. can't have the young replacing the old if they never make it to middle age due to a lack of investment and all.

that being said, the current governments of the west do have plenty of similarities with the various mafias... but in my opinion the issue of runaway government is a failure mode resulting from particular circumstances rather than a problem of government in the abstract.