Since the days of early hunter-gatherer tribes, every community has faced the same challenge: how to deal with the split between those who contribute and those who don't. This ancient struggle is traced from the earliest villages to modern welfare systems, exposing how history has always been shaped by the tension between those who create value, and those who live off the efforts of others. From slavery to feudalism, empires, revolutions, and today's entitlement economies, we must ask ourselves: Who truly sustains a society? When does support become exploitation? And what happens when the parasites outnumber the producers?
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