> Be glad our civilization isn't built on sustenance farming anymore. Oh sure, but that doesn't mean we have to accept as normal governments where leeches enri

> Be glad our civilization isn't built on sustenance farming anymore. Oh sure, but that doesn't mean we have to accept as normal governments where leeches enriching themselves and their fat friends manage to create public debt of more than 100% of the GDP and make the money printer go brrrrrr everytime there is problem (which is another gigantic problem in itself). A country like France is officially 57% of the GDP in public spending for terribly bad services in return. Poor education, hospitals in terribly bad shapes, no doctors in villages, insane taxation (France has 400 different taxes, more than six times the number of taxes Germany has, for example) and an insane number of useless public servants working on collecting those unnecessary taxes. It's too easy of a mental shortcut to say: "We don't live in caves anymore, with the men hunting and the women feeding the kids, so everything we did was obviously perfect". BTW we had universities, roads, ships, etc. at a time where the effective tax rate on farmers was something like 2% yearly. And Greece and Rome were advanced civilizations. "By extracting rents and taxes" makes a lot of heavy lifting: there's quite a difference between something like a reasonable yearly tax rate on income/production and a planned economy.