You (and others on this thread, on both sides) are pretending that there's no gradation between "roving bands of cannibal looters" (the "Mad Max" scenario) and "Tyrannical government controls every single aspect of your daily life" (the "1984" scenario), when in fact there is a very large amount of space between those two scenarios.

That is a fundamentally dishonest argument.

There are honest discussions of exactly where the boundaries on government power should lie, but this isn't one of them.