Do we need government because there would be chaos otherwise, because "people are bad"? No.
If people are overwhelmingly bad, and if left to their own devices have no desire to help one another, government can never work, as the people given seats of power in the state would be inherently bad, too. Government would then actually make things worse than the default state, arguably. Bad people having massive power would likely be worse for individual rights than not having any seats of state power at all, in the first place. There are at least 262,000,000 corpses piled up in the last 100 years or so alone, due to democide (not counting war), which serve as testament to this, if loss of human life is the metric for failure. Here are some average homicide statistics just for rough comparison.
If people are overwhelmingly self-interested and desire survival, the best way to achieve this is through production, trade, and voluntary charity. If people are not self-interested, and do not desire peaceful survival, living in a community with others and attempting to build a societal model makes absolutely no sense.
History has proven time and time again that no economy can be successfully controlled and managed by centralized, blanket models backed by force, as people's individual wants and needs are limitlessly unique and varied.
Freedom and self-interest incentivize peace and cooperation. For example, if people choose not to trade and not to help in their societies, the other members of society will be less likely to trade and help them, thus limiting their survival capacity and success. It is obviously against one's own self-interest to be completely selfish and unhelpful in a society where there is no state to shield bad actors from consequences. If there is a state monopoly on violence that mandates specific trading and bans other trade — and shields select actors from economic consequence — an imbalance is created which results in suffering and violence.
The most sustainable rules and rights are those that apply to everyone equally. If one individual or class of individuals in a society is given "extra rights" this engenders more conflict than is necessary, and potentiates violence. If one man is allowed to kill and take land because he says he was "chosen to rule," others will side with him, or fight him. And then fight each other as armies fighting for or against this sociopathic madman.
If, however, all rights are based on the physical reality of self-ownership, nobody has "extra rights," and property is always defined based on the ownership of one's own body and the resources said body and mind non-violently procure.
There will still be conflict, but as there is no preferential treatment of any one individual or class of individuals, there is fairness and greater peace.
