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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

One difference is that the pencil story actually happened. It describes real practical life.

Your village police story OTOH is made up.

Pretty sure there are police forces.

Yes, but none of them were formed in a village where people were first martial arts experts, then tried hiring private security guards, and finally realized the wisdom of creating a state with taxation rights to finance a police force.

I usually hear about villages forming militias rather than hiring professional security. It would be interesting to read examples of primitive governments formed like that.

If you count in "hiring" security from within the community, then this would probably describe most governments.

But non of them is financed voluntary and non of them was created in voluntary association.

I think any recently formed countries, created by pionners (Israel come to my mind, and kurdistan may be the next) would contradict your claim.

Most Palestinians and anti-government Jews in Israel wouldn't agree. Maybe Kurdistan will be the first country in which political elites (backed by populist voting majority) treat all their citizens as subjects and not as objects to achieve their own objectives. I hope so, I don't know much about Kurdistan.

It's the sort of thing that happened in history as best as we can tell. If you want cases where we've observed the whole process, the development of alliances in EVE online from groups of friends to large quasi-governmental organisations complete with legalistic codes has been fascinating to watch.

The pencil story is entirely a made-up parable as well. The author is simply imagining how the pencil industry operates -- he didn't literally trace the steps in the process himself and was a grocery wholesaler in real life, not a pencil manufacturer. If you agree with his political assumptions that the free market is ideal it all sounds very convincing, but that's the problem with any political diatribe.

Now you made me find an article about how Leonard Read researched pencil manufacturing for the essay: https://fee.org/articles/leonard-read-the-spiritual-economis...

If such a high profile and somewhat controversial essay was wrong on the details, I think we'd have heard about those errors.

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