I actually think more people need to question these concepts, as you cannot engage within a system that cannot be questioned. Systems that cannot be questioned are authoritarian and driven by force and power. To have a democracy ruled by law you need consent and that requires understanding and, therefore questioned. A society that cannot supply answers is in very shaky territory. The post war social contract enabled questions to be asked and answered within its vibrant literary worlds of alternative, often dystopian, worlds and science fiction, many of them classics.
The beginnings of an answer lie in the realisation and knowledge that questions of taxation and how much power law should have when is exactly what politicians debate and is exactly what choosing political parties is about!
When Tories go on about small state and low regulation, they’re talking about removing all obligations of the state to individuals and, as you mentioned, removing the power to enforce laws and taxation. The problem is that if you take taxation away the state has no money and therefore no power. It effectively ceases to exist. What they don’t tell you is that it means no healthcare, no education, and more crucially no law enforcement, no checks on the power of those with power - individuals or companies - to do precisely what they want, ruining people’s lives and the land and ecosystems in the process.
The far left, as it’s called, is the argument that everything should be surrendered to the power of the state and the state should govern everything for its own benefit: as it has a longer life than any individual member, so members are best served by working for its survival. The obvious problem is that it involves throwing individuals lives and rights under a bus. It does not have much of a presence here now.
We navigate, or should, between the two extremes. It’s easy to see how they can come to resemble each other, taking the lives of poorer individuals for naught. Most understand the second extreme very well, but less so the first. We’ve seen communism in states more recently than imperialism. But as the first extreme has grown in power its beneficiaries have increasingly - imho - gained powers to cloudy waters and wreck the educated and informed debates needed to best balance different factions and priorities.
That is where we are in my opinion, and as SerendipityJane points out, you need consent to be able to operate in the large scale societies we have. As people see - and they do - that societies increasingly are not representative, not balanced, not in fact reasoned at all and are merely about power, they have no reason to meekly engage with their own impoverishment.
The sheer numbers in our society are a major factor by themselves.