The Essence of Power: Legalized Plunder

Human civilization, in one telling, is a long chronicle of how power decides who gets what. Power doesn’t create resources; it reallocates them. As societies matured, the methods of taking shifted from raw force to finely tuned systems—wrapped in legality and moral language—so effective that the people being skimmed often consent to the skimming.

Power in its original form: naked force

In early tribal life, the strong simply seized the weak’s food, land, and women. Victors in conflict claimed the losers’ property—and often their lives—because they could.

With the rise of agriculture came the first states, and extraction became a standing arrangement. City-states, kingdoms, empires—whatever the label—functioned as organized machines for taking. Rulers invoked divine right or sacred mandate to justify their authority to levy grain and labor.

Taxation was the earliest standardized, “lawful” plunder. The tithe, medieval dues, corvée labor—systems that reliably siphoned the surplus of peasants upward. Those who worked the land handed over most of what they produced, while kings and nobles lived off the flow. That this endured owed much to the costume it wore: “order” and “protection.” Pay your taxes, the story went, and the army will keep raiders at bay and markets open. Strip off the rhetoric, though, and you still find the strong extracting from the weak.

Power in its hidden form: the transfer machine

After the Industrial Revolution, expropriation didn’t vanish; it learned subtlety. The dominant classes no longer needed to knock on doors with spears. Law, finance, and money could do the job more efficiently.

Modern tax systems exemplify this kind of legalized, high-throughput transfer. Instead of soldiers collecting sacks of wheat, withholding skims paychecks before they hit a worker’s bank account; value-added and sales taxes bite at every step of production and consumption. Nearly any form of output is obliged to let power take its cut first—so normalized that many regard it as simple “civic duty.”

Inflation is another quiet, potent siphon. When governments overspend, they can issue more money and let prices do the rest. The nominal amounts in your wallet may stay the same, but what they buy shrinks. The real wealth of ordinary people silently migrates elsewhere. History supplies cautionary case studies: Weimar Germany’s paper mark, Hungary’s pengő, Zimbabwe’s dollar, Venezuela’s bolívar, Argentina’s periodic peso crises—all demonstrations of how aggressive money creation can strip savers without a single door being kicked in.

On today’s stage, some argue the largest extractor is the U.S. federal government, which—through an ever-rising debt ceiling and cycles of quantitative easing—rearranges global wealth via the dollar system. Whether you agree or not, the claim points to a broader truth: monetary policy can move value massively and invisibly.

Modern finance adds its own plumbing to the transfer. Banks lend and collect interest. Corporations raise capital in stock markets and capture enormous gains. Meanwhile, most people trade their time for wages paid in currencies that can lose purchasing power faster than paychecks grow. The great investment banks, the funds behind the markets, the boards of sprawling corporations—together they amount to a contemporary extraction coalition. They don’t empty your pockets at gunpoint; they write the rules so the river of wealth keeps running their way.

Power’s Final Form: Devotion as Tribute

The most sophisticated kind of taking isn’t prying something from another’s hands—it’s getting them to offer it up willingly. Religions, ideologies, and nationalism are virtuosos of this art.

In medieval Europe, the Church collected tithes while calling it “God’s will.” In absolutist monarchies, kings defended punishing levies as the outworking of “divine right.” In modern states, higher taxes arrive dressed as “macroeconomic management,” “public services,” and “the social safety net.”
People rarely revolt against this kind of extraction because they believe the story that justifies it.

On the eve of the French Revolution, peasants endured aristocratic exactions as if they were part of the “natural order.” Under the Soviet system, workers accepted low pay and grinding hours believing they were “building the future.” Today, the middle class works ferociously to service mortgages and consumer debt and calls it “getting ahead.”

The most unsettling thing about power isn’t that it can force obedience; it’s that it can make obedience feel self-evident.

How to live with power’s extraction?

If extraction is intrinsic to power, what can ordinary people do?

First, learn the rules of the game.
Don’t imagine that a new institution, constitution, or leader will abolish extraction. Power continually invents fresh ways to corner resources; only the efficiency and subtlety of the methods change.

Second, avoid the bottom rung of the food chain.
In agrarian eras, peasants bore the heaviest burden; in industrial times, assembly-line workers did; in financial capitalism, overleveraged homeowners and maxed-out consumers are the easiest targets. To lessen the bite, move closer to the allocation center: accumulate capital, seek privileged information, or master scarce skills.

Finally, stay awake—refuse domestication.
Power manufactures “consensus” to persuade people that the status quo is immovable. History says otherwise: every extraction regime eventually breaks under its own excesses. The Roman Empire slid toward fiscal collapse, the French Revolution exploded under aristocratic greed, and the 2008 financial crisis spread worldwide after Wall Street’s overreach.

The essence of power hasn’t changed; only the instruments have. From violence to statute, from taxation to finance, from faith to ideology—the methods of extraction keep evolving: subtler, faster, harder to resist. And yet human progress has come from challenging these arrangements. From slavery to feudalism to capitalism, each great transition was driven by the resistance of the extracted and a renegotiation of who gets what.

The rule is simple: see power clearly to stay clear-headed. Only those who grasp the rules of the game have a shot at finding room to live—and even to thrive—inside this perpetual contest of taking.