The earliest Greek poleis were loose confederations of families and clans. Rome began as a collection of pastoralists on seven hills. The American republic was born from men who had just finished killing tax collectors. The founders were not idealists dreaming of a better government; they were pragmatists who had experienced the worst of one.

The pattern is consistent across millennia: societies begin in conditions of rough freedom, develop governance organically in response to genuine needs (common defence, property rights, contract enforcement), then — almost without exception — allow that governance apparatus to calcify, and, like a metastasizing cancer, expand and eventually consume the productive class it was supposedly built to serve.

Alexis de Tocqueville saw it clearly in 1835. Writing about the soft despotism he feared democratic societies were moving toward, he described an "immense and tutelary power" that would "take upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate." It would be "absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild." It would not crush men — it would merely compress them, enervate them, extinguish their capacity for self-direction. The cage would have no visible bars.