It’s not as crazy a question as you may think. Have you ever thought about how countries form?
About 12,000 years ago, humans emerged from an ice age and started to farm crops. For the first time in our history, humans could count on a supply of food without having to move around with the seasons. More importantly, because the grains they grew could be stored for many years, they could produce excess amounts of food to protect them from starving if they had future crop failures.
Being able to produce and store food opened up possibilities for some humans to profit. They could use the threat of violence to extract food from others without farming themselves. Small, but strong and violent groups could take food from larger more passive groups.
Over time, some of these small groups grew to include large numbers of farmers. As any mob boss will tell us, the worst thing about a lucrative protection racket is that other gangsters want to steal it.
So the most successful protection rackets were threatened by other violent groups who saw a quick way to gain wealth and power.
Not a problem for the smartest protection racket bosses, though. They just convinced the farmers under their “protection” that the other groups were too powerful and would steal their property, unless they themselves fight to protect it.
Of course, in effect they’re fighting to defend the protection racket. And once the fight is over, they go back to paying protection, even though they’re the ones protecting the mob boss now. And their protection payments are renamed taxes.
And that’s how a country is born.
Not convinced? That’s understandable. From an early age, we’re taught to love our country and show respect to its flag like it’s a living being. We’re told that we and our fellow country folk are exceptional, with unique and high-minded characteristics that we don’t share with people from other countries. We’re persuaded to believe we’re all part of the same team while being taught to show deference to our betters at the top of society.
What you read above may feel disloyal and unpatriotic, but focus on the facts.
By Q3 of 2026, the wealthiest 10% of Americans had hoarded 68% of all the country’s wealth, while the poorest 50% were left with just 2.5% of all the wealth.
Doesn’t that look like how a protection racket would split the money?
And in the EU, the poorest 50% share about 4% of all the wealth, while the poorest 50% in the UK have less than 6%, so protection racket economics aren’t just an American thing.
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