Das Coopital: A Chicken and Egg Story of the Economy

[The2ndWheel]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/12075

In the beginning, roving bands of people gathered fruit and plants and hunted proto-chickens, until one day they discovered that they could eat more regularly if they cultivated the plants that they ate and domesticated the chickens. Thus was born agriculture, more or less, and everyone contributed their labor in equal measure to the number of chickens they wanted to eat. It was hard work, but there was a chicken in every pot, and, perhaps, a little pot in every farmer. Life was good (except for the chickens).

It did not take too long, however, for some people to discover that those who were bigger and stronger than others could do less work than everyone else by stealing someone else's chickens. Sometimes, the bigger, stronger people stole the chickens outright kicking sand in the weaker farmers' faces saying, more or less, 'Whatcha gonna do 'bout it, Chickenhead?' Or, they engaged in the original protection racket demanding that smaller chicken farmers hand over a portion of their hard-earned eggs and poultry in return for the bigger guys (yes, it is almost always guys in a dimorphic species like human beings) not beating them up and stealing all, rather than just some of their chickens.

Soon, this protection racket led to another protection racket: a different group of large, strong chicken farmers who realized that chicken farming was damn hard work and they could eat just as well if they went into the business of protecting all the smaller chicken farmers from the other big guys who were chicken thieves and racketeers. Thus was born a warrior class of chicken hawks who, in return for being given a monopoly of violence plus a substantial tax on the chickens and eggs produced by all the other hard-laboring chicken farmers, protected the majority working class from the terrorism of the bad guy chicken thieves.

Over time, however, it became difficult to distinguish between the chicken thieves who terrorized the chicken farmers and the warrior class of chicken hawks who were supposed to defend the chicken farmers from the terrorists. Either way, the chicken farmers labored harder than ever because if they did not produce more to satisfy the thieving bad guys, then they still had to pay the same number of chickens and eggs to the warriors who did not labor in the chicken coops at all (because they were dedicated full time to weapons and battle training to fight off the bad chicken thieves). The warriors eventually became institutionalized; they became an upper class out of which evolved an aristocratic caste of hereditary chicken kings and queens, a "nobility" and, eventually, "leaders."