Economic History: The excuse in the past was that pretty much the only way to get enough for yourself and your family was to find a way to join the force-and-fraud domination-and-exploitation gang that was society’s élite and took 1/3 of the crop and the manufactures from the farmers and the craftsman. Become a thug-with-a-spear (or a gunpowder weapon), one of their bosses, or one of their tame accountants, bureaucrats, and propagandists. That was their excuse. What is our excuse?

Patrick Wyman: Ordinary People Do Terrible Things: ‘Evil acts are easily normalized…. Two people I think about from time to time…. Nanaya-ila’i. That wasn’t the name she had been given… but one that was foisted upon her… [and her] daughter…. Slavers who ripped the two from their place of birth in… Elam and took them to captivity in Assyria… more than 2,600 years ago…. [A] merchant… Mannu-kī-Aššūr, paid the price of one mina of silver, about 500 grams for the adult woman and her daughter…. This is the only time Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter appear in the historical record…. Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter were just two of the thousands upon thousands of victims of the Assyrian Empire…. As long as grasping rulers and would-be warlords have sought to expand their power, common people have suffered the consequences…. But those ambitious politicians and conquerors didn’t do the dirty work themselves. They had underlings, generals and officers and common soldiers and bureaucrats… <patrickwyman.substack.com/p/ordinary-pe…>