The State as a Protection Racket

Your government is essentially just a mafia operation that went legit. We’re taught this

cute story about a social contract where everyone agreed to follow laws for the greater good,

but sociologist Charles Tilly had a darker theory. He argued that states were actually built

on war-making. It is a classic protection racket. The state creates a threat and then

demands you pay taxes to be saved from it. Eventually, we just got used

to it. Foucault adds that now, we don’t even need the threat of violence

because we’ve been trained to police ourselves. You aren't a citizen, you are just paying

the boss for protection.