I can’t see any reason why someone like Megan McArdle would be intensely anxious about government and yet be relatively sanguine about industry, civic organizations, and so on, if the issue is that it is impossible to account for or anticipate unintended consequences.
I'll give you one very important reason -- coercion. Put simply the government has guns and can force people to do things. This is something no corporation, industry, or civic organization can do. Market-based transactions are generally mutually beneficial. Therefore, a large difference in both theory and practice exists between the unintended consequences of changes in corporate/industy and government policies. Government actions are in an entirely different category from other actions, and it follows that so are the unintended consequences.
If a customer doesn't like the change in policies of a corporation, then they stop being a customer. One can't opt out of falling under government policies. Therefore, there is a response mechanism built-in to the market that doesn't exist in government actions. Sure, one could not vote for the incumbents in the next election, but that is a diffuse protest. One vote every four to six years isn't a good feedback mechanism. Sure, one could write their representative, but again you can't opt out of the policy once enacted.
Nevertheless, the material difference is government ability to coerce.
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I think this is my big disagreement with libertarians in general, namely, the proposition that the power to coerce resides solely with the state. It may make a difference that the state names everyone as a citizen (or a subject) at birth, that if there is any contract, it is the theoretical 'social contract' that precedes an individual's relationship with a state. You can change citizenship potentially (just like you can not be a customer or not work in a job) but it's very hard in the contemporary global interstate system to be without citizenship (whereas at least notionally you can opt out of market relations almost entirely.)
But that's on paper. In practice, market institutions and civic institutions have significant power over individuals in everyday life, and that power can be and often is used for coercive purposes.
Whatever the paper differences, in practice, whether a bureaucrat mediating my access to health care is an agent of the federal government or an agent of a large insurance corporation doesn't make that much of a real difference. In either case, that's a person remote from my life who is making decisions that have a huge impact on my life, and my ability to seek redress for those decisions is relatively limited in either case. Being a customer or a citizen amounts to the same thing in this case, because in either instance, I have very few, possibly no, alternatives to living with that relationship and hoping it will work in my favor.
A lot of libertarian thinkers strike me as having a very unadorned, formalist and simplistic understanding of social power, which is why I think they make the unsustainably sharp distinction between the state and non-state institutions that they do. I understand what the basis of that argument is, but I think it's simply wrong in terms of how people actually live.
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