On the Origins of Government

A Fable By Sharon DuBois

I have heard this story in several different forms. It is certainly apocryphal, but the point it makes is well worth repeating.

It seems that, many thousands of years ago, humanity lived in small and scattered villages. It was not an easy or peaceful life. Food was hard to come by, and roving hoards of bandits came by on a regular basis to steal what little food, tools, and clothing the people had managed to set aside for the future.

Now, the bandits were not stupid; they had, after all, managed to find a way to provide for themselves without doing any real work. And as long as they rotated their attention among several villages, and as long as they did not steal all the food during any one raid, their victims were able to recover between visits and survive. The problem, from the viewpoint of the thieves, was that there were other groups also stealing from the same villages. That meant that sometimes, when they came to visit one of the settlements, a competitor had been there recently, and there was nothing left to steal.

So the smartest of the thieves came up with a plan. Instead of roaming around stealing from all the villages, they would settle down. They would pick a spot right in the middle of the choicest village. They would convince the villagers that the presence of their erstwhile enemies was, in fact, for the benefit of the village. Their new neighbors would protect them from all those other bandits out there. In exchange for the protection, all the villagers had to do was willingly give their patrons a part of the food they had worked so hard to produce for themselves, and provide them with clothes and housing and tools.

These taxes were, in effect, the very same items that the bandits had been stealing from them; but the thieves were able to convince the villagers to give willingly to the thieves what the thieves had been stealing from them in exchange for protection that the villagers should not have needed in the first place.

And thus was born government.

Anyone who has ever watched that wonderful classic movie The Magnificent Seven (1960 version) will recognize at least part of the plot. In the movie, the leader of the bandits argues that his band of thugs is not really so bad because they always leave the villagers with enough food for survival.

The big difference between this story and that movie is that, in the movie, the men who came to rescue the village turned into good guys. They taught the villagers to defend themselves, and all but one of the rescuers who did not die during the ensuing battles went back where they came from.

The only rescuer who stayed in the village dropped his guns into the dirt, married the girl, became a farmer, and agreed to produce his own food.

(This article appeared in the October 2022 issue of The Oakland Express.)