I think some people *think* they don't want to be 'controlled' (taxed, regulated, punished for crimes, whatever), but they wouldn't really like the alternatives.
Without law, you'd be poor because there' be no infrastructure, coordination among people, work force, industry, economy, whatever, but more importantly, you'd have to watch your back 24/7 and even then you'd probably get robbed/stolen from and/or killed. Tribal societies tend to manage decently with unwritten laws, but I don't think that would work for a country of 320,000,000 people. (And even with unwritten laws you're controlled, and possibly in even worse ways, as those unwritten rules would come from a more primitive mindset, and not to mention that nobody would get a fair and impartial hearing)
Without taxes the same would apply above re being poor and lack of infrastructure, and so would the rest the above because without taxes you can't have law enforcement (or even a unified legislative body) so you effectively can't have law.
With just enough law and taxes to enforce contractual agreements between corporations and citizens (libertarianism), it would be an utter nightmare. People naively imagine that all sorts of invisible hands would make everything work out. This is very idealistic and a \*huge\* assumption.
It would be complicated as heck, for example with companies offering services to validate other companies, products and services, services to validate those services, etc. ad infinitum; companies buying security/militia to protect against or attack other companies and people (I know, you could say attacking other companies with militia would be illegal, but it would probably be a lot easier to *buy verdicts* in such a scenario); perhaps people buying security against others and against companies in various forms (such as in legal services provided by lawyers), where there's always the risk of your provider selling out to a higher bidder; only wealth would afford you basic rights with certainty; everybody would be severely exploited; you couldn't trust any product on the market (assuming you'd even end up with a choice of products); there'd be way more of a fast-track to companies buying legislation and it would quickly become a corporatocracy, where everything is ruled by those who want to make money and have the least scruples in their way of getting it.
I could be wrong in the details of the complications and exploitations, but one way or another it would be a very dark dystopia, there would be much less unification and integration, the common man would be severely exploited and his rights trampled on, bought and sold, etc.
It reminds me of this scene from Idiocracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW-4LU79qbU , which is unrealistic in some ways (mainly for humar value), but the gist of it could be spot-on for what a libertarian society would be like (even though Idiocracy wasn't meant to be about libertarianism per se).
I could probably write a book on all the ways a libertarian society would and could go horribly wrong, but it would be hard because there are sooo many possibilities / possible paths to think about, predicting human society is a really hard thing to do, hence so many failed governments for example.
We desperately *need* regulation, and a *lot* of it, in a field where corporations will do anything they can to make a back and would even kill people if they could. Just making the extreme forms of this malignancy illegal, such as murder, wouldn't be enough.
We also *need* social programs to protect those who can't work, and that includes those who can't work for reasons that aren't necessarily accounted for by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or aren't easy to diagnose, so probably the only way really protect people is to provide a universal minimum income, it's extremely inhumane to allow people to fall through the cracks of a capitalistic system (where you must sell your labor and professionalism to The Man in order to merely survive) and to consequently live on the streets.. "A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members." ~ Mahatma Ghandi
I may be a little less totalitarian than our government is currently heading toward being, though.. I don't approve of the mass surveillance at all, nor other aspects of its war on terror. The government and its legislation aren't infallible enough to warrant having eyes on everyone at all times, that just has this air of stuffiness to it and it's rather paranoia-inducing, and if whatever unjust laws the government has or will create, the way things are going eventually you'll have no chance of getting away with breaking it. And not to mention that they've created workarounds for due process for anyone labeled a terrorist, which could be used to know knows what leverage against people..
I think this is all because the threat of terrorism is such a psychological trigger for so many people, despite its overall lack of importance with respect to other threats. (see http://picpaste.com/pics/actual_hazard_vs_public_outrage.1456559808.jpg ). Some people more anti-government-inclined people might think the war on terror is just being used deliberately by the government to gain more power in general and bring is closer and closer to a Big Brother state, but I don't think this is the case. I think it's just that politicians and the NSA fall for the same reactionary paranoia toward terrorism that your average citizen does. Well, that and I suspect that people in charge at agencies such as the CIA and NSA like to feel like they're doing something really important and powerful so they go overboard in justifying doing things that aren't really called for. Which I don't think is exactly the same as the government just wanting to put an iron blanket over everybody.
Anyway, back to the original topic posted.. humanity currently \*needs\* some level of control because people are too primitive/selfish/violent/barbaric to coexist peacefully without law. Maybe there are even more good or at least decent people out there than there are bad ones, but there are enough bad ones to make it all necessary. And of course, even decent people won't necessarily *cooperate* at the levels we currently cooperate at (to give us our infrastructure, technology, economy) without a government, government jobs and law enforcement.
(It would probably actually be better if we *didn't* have such large scale cooperation, though, despite how much people adore a strong economy, because the stronger the economy the more rapidly we destroy the planet and propel ourselves toward inevitable cataclysm.. but the above argument appeals the values that the common person, including those who are against any kind of control, would have)
Oh, one other thought I had.. I mentioned that without formal laws and law enforcement, you'd still have unwritten laws in a tribal society (supposing a population this dense could even have a tribal society, or more to the point, that a population *coming from* organized government could possibly fall back to the kind of society that people who were never adopted into the modern world have, which I think they couldn't), but I suppose a person who's against controlling others would be against those unwritten laws too. But at some point you have to choose among practical options, or else you might as well be asking for unicorns; and also, those who speak out against control are probably speaking out specifically against big government and liberals.