Well, I thought I'd mention that it could be useful to discuss that laissez-faire doesn't imply government inaction. There are many times when government inaction could prove to greatly inhibit personal freedoms.

A strongly enforced Rule of Law (distinct from ad hoc regulation and run-of-the-mill government meddling in personal and market affairs) is a necessary component in any free society.

I wonder what might happen if proponents of “limited government” instead began to advance arguments for “honest government,” or “honorable government” – based on the premise that the state is like a person: it posesses (in addition to a capacity for evil) a benevolent potential, that is best actualized when it focuses on its strength: protecting citizens from theft, fraud, and physical harm.

I disagree. What he wrote was true and a valid argument for the point he was making. It was not a metaphor as he used it. He used poison as an example (not a metaphor) that demonstrated that a certain line of reasoning was invalid. He was not employing metaphorical or analogical reasoning here, but critiquing the logic of an inference by re-applying the same logic to another situation.

Specifically, he was refuting an inference to a conclusion about causality. His problem was with this statement: “[m]any states evidently succeed in achieving relatively benign outcomes”

He was, in fact, making the familiar correlation-does-not-imply-causality argument, using poison as an example. If some states are correlated with relatively benign outcomes, this does not mean that the the states achieved those outcomes.

Although the latter will be hard to get rid of (because of concentrated benefits, reduced costs), at least you can appeal to shared norms about fairness. But with the former, you have to make ethical arguments (say, against the idea of positive rights) that clash with widely accepted norms.