Said1
Gold Member
mrsx said:Income redistribution is actually the first and oldest function of government. In the earliest hunting-gathering bands the leader had responsibility to see that infants, the old, the sick, the disabled got enough to survive - food taken from the best hunters. This universal practice has obvious biological advantages as not even the best hunter can survive to reproduce without the social network of the tribe.
They ran into problems when centralized government (cheifdoms) were introduced, or the politiciaztion process (which you mention below). In the beginning, foragers were real eagletarian societies where everyone had equal access to resources and the family unit was essential. They often intermarried, and their societies were sturctured around cosmologies such as the age-grade system the Massai still practice today in Africa. The band leader didn't have much authority over individuals and families were able to merge or leave other tribal units for whatever reason.
When agricultural communities arose in some river valleys 10,000 years ago, the redistribution function of government continued. Now a king presided over a record-keeping class of priests who guarded the annual surplus, taxing and redistributing in the furtherance of what our Constitution refers to as "the general Welfare."
This led to less access to resousrces and specialized labor instead of each family being self-sufficent, or sharing resources during droughts ect. They became dependant on the government and less dependant on each other. This also created a class system within ancient cheifdoms. Easter Island is an interesting case study of a cheifdom gone array.