>>Street - free market can take care of the as well, you pay a toll everyday - it is called taxes.<<
I agree with you.
There are two meanings of the word "government" which get conflated because of history. There is government as robber-baron/bandit, and there is government as "helmsman" - that's the literal translation from the Greek, meaning the guy who sits in the back of the boat and handles the rudder - the pilot.
Did you ever see "The Seven Samurai"? An excellent depiction of both kinds of government, at least in my opinion - well, maybe several kinds of government.
During a time of war and social unrest in Japan, a village of farmers is being preyed on by bandits, who swoop down on them from time to time and steal all their rice and carry off their young women - in other words, tax collectors.-g-
The village is unable to survive unless something is done, so they send two of their most reliable young men to the nearest city to hire samurai to protect them. These particular samurai happen to be out of work because of the ongoing war - their own noble masters have been slain and they haven't been able to find new ones.
It's not glorious to work for food, but it's better than starving. So the samurai agree to defend the village, and after a lot of wonderful battles they defeat the bandits and the village is free, at least until the next crew of bandits comes by, and the surviving samurai leave and continue looking for noble masters to serve.
So we see depicted "government" by bandits - other examples are bad King John and the Sheriff of Nottingham from the Robin Hood stories, and the Vikings, and other Norsemen collecting tribute, and Attila the Hun, and Genghis Khan and so on. They are acting in their own self-interest, but they are able to control populations because they have superior force.
We also see depicted government by village elders - who hire the samurai, and pay them with food that all the villagers contribute. They act for the good of the village as a whole. The samurai know better than the village elders how to protect the village but they have no real interest in doing so other than because it is their agreed-upon duty and they have a code of honor.
We don't see, but appreciate by what is said, government by nobles - it is better than government by bandits, but to the ordinary person in a village, the only difference may be whether there is peace or strife.
Kurosawa makes us feel, intensely, the horror of being at the mercy of bandits, and how important it is to fight for freedom and self-determination. Those who are willing to fight to the death to preserve the safety of the weak and the helpless are owed a special duty of gratitude - but the beauty of the film is that we understand that they are at the service of the village, not its masters. Samurai are bound by a code, they do not act purely in self-interest. Their code makes them trustworthy.
We see clearly that force can be good as well as evil. We want good force, protective force. We want the wise pilot, the seasoned helmsman, as our employee, our agent, not our master.
The people that we hire to do the things we cannot do, or do not want to do, are our employees, not our masters. Ideally, that is what our government is. We don't have kings. We are all equal. We have a division of labor, and some people we hire to take care of government. They wield force we delegate to them, and no other. |
