Quote from The Rise and Decline of the State

the proprietor — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 05:40:00 +0000

I’ve started reading Martin van Creveld’s The Rise and Decline of the State. I haven’t made it too far in yet and I’m still reading through the section on pre-state political communities. Today, I came across a particularly fascinating fact about confidence in “public” treasuries.

Simply put, the confidence in the government’s ability and willingness to honor its obligations was non-existent; it is not for nothing that, in Hebrew, “sending one’s money down the drain” is derived from a term whose original meaning was “public treasury” (Greek timaion).

(The quote is from page 55 of the paperback edition, ISBN 978-0-521-65629-0.)

Electric Dirt Farmer » Martin van Creveld

Quote from The Rise and Decline of the State