Have you heard? Big trouble. What is that Ah Bian thinking? I thought the world's messy enough, with all that terrorism, middle-east tensions, accounting shocks, stock market and economic slumps. Just when the relation between US and China seems to moving in a positive direction, with Bush inviting Premiere Jiang to be a guest at his ranch in Texas, dear Mr Ah Bian has to provoke. I'm not eager to see how the Beijing and Washington sides will react. Sigh! Share with you a story on how 'government' comes about. I heard this one in Chen Kang's 'Political Economy of East Asia' lecture. (You've seen him on tv before? He's a rare good lecturer.) Long long time ago, there was no government. People just live in nomadic groups, and survived on the foods they could find. But gradually, human beings learned how to make tools, and they also learned how to store and accumulate food and other things for their living needs. And as the community grew, it became harder to move around. Hence, they started villages so that they can settle down in one fixed place. A group of clever (but bad) people realised then can get things without working hard, by becoming bandits. Since there were, of course, many like-minded people, they would gather strength and rob villages. The bandits would rob the poor hapless villagers as soon as they had accumulated enough wealth. And the 'easy money' resulted in the formation of many groups of bandits. Since there were only limited resources to go around, life then became harder for the bandits. The leaders of different bandit groups then sat down and discussed what they should do to continue their survival. They arrived at an agreement, that each group would be in charged of one or several villages to rob, and one group shall not rob villages that 'belonged' to another group. And so, that was how the firsts government came about. Government, as we know today, was actually a group of bandits. And the taxes that we pay were loot. Interesting. :)