Basically, the #Anarchists were right, #states began as #tax extortion rackets:
“One theory suggests it was the intensification of agriculture that spurred the creation of states. Once fertilisation and irrigation were used, it produced a surplus that elites could extract to build and maintain states. However, an alternative view, first put forward by anthropologist James Scott, is gaining ground. … By Scott’s account, Mafia-style protection rackets forced people to produce grain, from which tax could be extracted and used to fund further exploitation. Scott proposed that these protection rackets were effectively the original states. … We tested these ideas, combining data from hundreds of societies worldwide with a global language family tree representing the ancestral relationships between those societies. … grain agriculture consistently predicted subsequent state formation and the adoption of taxes.”