From Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick’s “Anarchy, State and Utopia.”
Imagine you are a slave.
Stage one: You are the slave at the mercy of a brutal master, who forces you to work for his purposes and beats you arbitrarily.
Stage two: The master decides to beat you only for breaking the rules, and even grants you some free time.
Stage three: You are part of a group of slaves subject to this master. He decides, on grounds generally acceptable, how goods should be allocated among you all.
Stage four: The master requires his slaves to work only three days per week, granting them the other four days off. They can do as they wish during their free time.
Stage five: The master now allows the slaves to work wherever they wish. His main caveat is that they must send him three-sevenths of their wages, corresponding o the three days’ worth of work they once had to do on his land every week. In an emergency he can force them to do his bidding once again, and he retains the power to alter the fraction of their wages to which he lays claim.
Stage six: The master grants all 10,000 of his slaves, except you, the right to vote. They can decide among themselves how much of their (and your) earnings to take and what outlets to fund with the money. They can decide what you are and are not allowed to do. We can suppose for the sake of argument that the master irrevocably grants this right to the slaves. You now have 10,000 masters, or a single 10,000-headed master.
Stage seven: You are granted the freedom to try to persuade the 10,000 to ecercise their vast powers in a particular way. You still do not have the right to vote, but you can try to influence those who do.
Stage eight: The 10,000 grant you the right to vote, but only to break a tie. You write down your vote, and if a tie should occur, they open it and record it. No tie has ever occurred.
Stage nine: You are granted the right to vote. But functionally, it simply means, as in the eighth stage, that in the case of a tie, which has never occurred, your vote carries the issue.
Question: at which point did this become something other than the tale of a slave?