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Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

I love Wilhoit's original, and want to note that he's been active lately on HN as well (<https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=FrankWilhoit>).

His sentiments are pressaged by others, including Adam Smith (1776):

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

<https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/>

Or some guy named Matthew, somewhat earlier:

For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.

<https://biblehub.com/matthew/13-12.htm>

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> For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.

Matthew was a tax collector, this is literally expert advice, not just one of those religious metaphors.

That's not an interpretation I've encountered before. Any credible sources or references you'd care to provide?

(Not about Matthew's occupation but the meaning/interpretation of the verse.)

I just made it up. Also, Matthew is supposed to quote Jesus rather than give his own advice, and Jesus was not a tax collector.

> defense of the rich against the poor

Taking this a step further, it's logical to conclude that society itself is a constant war between rich people, who use their wealth (influence/power) to enlist the poor in their attacks on one another. Taking it another level, we could say that "society" itself is merely a side-effect of this war, in fact it is the current state-of-the-art weapon in this struggle. If something better than capitalistic society comes about (such as, most obviously, human-level AIs and robotics), the rich will not hesitate to abandon the society strategy.

That's pretty close to the insight I had about a decade ago reading the opening paragraphs of A.H.M. Jones's biography of Augustus.

I've quoted the passage, which describes the political balance and division between the optimates, populares, and equites, roughly the oligarchs, labour, and petit bourgousie, in this (now archived) Reddit post:

<https://web.archive.org/web/20230607042525/https://old.reddi...>

The durability of such conflict makes me strongly suspect that this is innate to human polity, and Jones's description of the respective groups' political platforms, concerns, and ideologies strike me as both insightful and possibly innate.

I've mentioned this several times previously on HN:

<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>

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