> While wer'e dreaming, the world would have been a better place if the US
> had never existed and columbus had never set sail.
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>From Jared Diamond, _Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies_
(NY: Norton, 1997), pp. 89-90
[One] consequence of a settled existence is that it permits one to store food surpluses, since storage would be pointless if one didn't remain nearby to guard the stored food. While some nomadic hunter-gatherers may occasionally bag more food than they can consume in a few days, such a bonanza is of little use to them because they cannot protect it. But stored food is essential for feeding non-food-producing specialists, and certainly for supporting whole towns of them. Hence, nomadic hunter-gatherer societies have few or no such full-time specialists, who instead first appear in sedentary societies.
Two types of such specialists are kings and bureaucrats. Hunter-gatherer societies tend to be relatively egalitarian, to lack full-time bureaucrats and hereditary chiefs, and to have small-scale political organization at the level of the band or tribe. That's because all able-bodied hunter-gatherers are obliged to devote much of their time to acquiring food. In contrast, once food can be stockpiled, a political elite can gain control of food produced by others, assert the right of taxation, escape the need to feed itself, and engage full-time in political activities....
A stored food surplus built up by taxation can support other full-time specialists besides kings and bureaucrats...it can be used to feed professional soldiers.
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Long as we're dreaming, maybe the world would have been a better place had settled agriculture never been invented!
Jacob Conrad