On government.

An attempt to summarize my own take on economy, politics, and government as these exist historically in human societies.

Teaching is a beggar's profession; so is most of the service economy. It does not make food, or shelter, or anything essential to its own or others' survival. That does not make it worthless, naturally, only non-essential and dependent: if we are busy trying not to die, we don't have time for non-essentials, and beggars may go unfed, unclothed, and unsheltered.

What keeps us alive is chiefly food and shelter: farming, foraging or hunting, and building are essential. Another essential that we don't always like much is protection: the ability to avoid predation skillfully, diplomatically, and when that fails, to defeat it directly, with violence.

Politics arises as we attempt to organize essentials and non-essentials within a community; as that community grows, the eventual outcome is always mafia. A legitimate mafia, one that operates by known rules and attempts somehow to incorporate all agents in any given community within its purview as human persons, is known as government. But every legimate mafia can and does go rogue, and every community contains seeds of many illegitimate mafias, waiting in the wings for the moment when the law fails. Caveat civis.

    ante diem VIII Kalendas Iunias, anno Domini MMXX                                         —JGM.