You don't have to be libertarian to recognize that Barre's military dictatorship was not an example of a good government. From Wikipedia:

> The United Nations Development Programme stated that "the 21-year regime of Siyad Barre had one of the worst human rights records in Africa."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siad_Barre#Human_rights_abuse_a...

I'm not trying to paint all governments with the same brush. I'm just saying that, perhaps, you don't know anything about Somalia and are just using it as a strawman against small government.

edit: it's one, single country that has had a very violent history, not a case study in deregulation of markets.

I didn’t say anything about small government or market deregulation. Small vs large is orthogonal to strong vs. weak.