Look what the cat brought in!
Catch it and get it out of this house!
"I have currency! I caught it! It's mine!" said the cat. She ran off with a fat green bug in her mouth that I worried was a praying mantis, so I followed. She stopped around the side of the greenhouse to get away from me, so when I appeared around the corner, she took off again, across the garden and into the rocks and trees. But I did see it resembled a worm more than a mantis, so I felt better about that, since killing a mantis is like killing a hawk.
The cat found this currency, which is how people used to find their's, and how all wild animals still eat -- they find nature's currency (bounty) growing and running all over the place. The cat found, or pounced on, the bug. It took cunning and skill, perhaps less than it takes to catch a bird, but still the same, work was involved. Once the rush of catching the prey was over, the cat started to think about protecting its rights to the prey it worked hard to catch. The cat knew others would similarly work hard to catch the same prey, but they would spend their energies struggling to get it out of the mouth of the original owner of the prey. So the cat bolted each time I got near to look at her catch, worried I would take it from her: if it were a praying mantis, I would have spent some time trying to catch the cat and free the bug.
This all seems to point to the fact that many animals have the instinct to protect possessions for which they have worked, which any reasonable animal can understand. But, animals look upon caught prey as "still in play," until it is fully eaten. The same can be said about possessions that are used through to the end of their life, such as a walking stick that eventually wears down before the death of the owner, or a car that one day is worth more being junked than being fixed up: people will try to use/ steal them until the items are worthless. People have made up rules to govern what is or is not in play, so as to mitigate grand theft auto and walking stick crime.
The cats don't have such rules, they have to play by natural rules, which to civilized people, seems cruel and unusual: another cat bullies the one with the prey and gets it from her, that is how it goes, perhaps she fights to get it back, either way, there are no artificial laws to control their behavior unless humans get involved. Anarchy or natural law simply says: who ever ends up with the bug, gets the bug, and it stays in play until eaten. Laws people write simply short circuit this process through _strict_ enforcement, and amongst humans, a police officer is supposed to stop a purse snatcher, who considers the lady's purse as still in play.
You will not boss your little cousins around...
The way you can tell if a law is real or not, is whether it requires enforcement -- natural law needs no enforcement, artificial laws require constant enforcement. Gravity and love need no enforcement, but the biggest military of all time, what does that say about American efforts at creating an imperialistic Capitalist Democracy? Is it really that unnatural -- does it need that much law enforcement?
Each and every civilized act has an equal and opposite uncivilized reaction on the earth, and that the atrocities done to the poorer half of the world's people are kind of a counterpoint to the _good_ civilizing that is done for the upper half. Just look at how America became great by becoming so civilized under the new democratic laws of the country that permitted the slaughter of tens of millions of Native-Americans and the enslavement of the Africans: the wealthy gentry were made so refined and civilized by killing off the savages, taking there emptied, sacred land, and by creating an economy supported by free native, African labor. So it seems that enforcement of artificial laws create opposite negative effects inasmuch as they are intended to create positive effects for those whom the laws are written.
Trumped-up laws that are designed to help one entity, necessarily hurt another entity, sometimes by accident, sometimes by an unavoidable side-effect, or else, by pre-determined intent. Either way, the laws are protecting/ helping someone against someone else, always. The laws that people like the best are the ones that are most generally applied to everyone and tend to not do unfair harm to others, such as the Ten Commandments and its spin-offs such as liberty, freedom and equality. These laws seem/ appear natural, maybe even super-natural to some people, and that's why people like them more than other, more specific/ fake laws that help individual interests.
The most unnatural/ ungodly laws are the ones the corporations lobby for -- they are the most clearly engineered bills that pin-point benefit for the entity the bill is to support, and loss for whom it is to crush or oppress. People don't read the bazillions of special interest bills/ earmarks lobbied for at the city, county, state and federal level, ever. Only the biggest laws get any press coverage, and that reporting is so warped left and right, none of it is understandable, much less believable. So it goes that Americans have a gigantic world full of laws that nowadays mostly benefit the corporations. A massive array of police officers and National Guardsmen are there to keep the peace domestically just in case any of those laws get broke, and our military troops garrisoned in over 100 countries around the world help keep the peace out there, where we get all that stuff we _desperately_ consume from big boxes 24/7/365.
I'm sorry, I can't answer all of your questions
right now, I'm too busy...
What is the rat race anyway? Does it include cats chasing bugs too? Is it the civilized way to chase bugs? Do we need to red line the economic engine to catch our bugs and rats? Maybe having a military several times larger than the combined total of the next few largest militaries helps us catch bugs. What happens when we use up/ catch everything that's economical/ easy/ feasible to catch? Work harder? Don't we already have to work harder to pay off our consumer debt that has piled up due to putting off daily living expenses, toy purchases and jumbo mortgages? Isn't it true the debt pile keeps people away in the opposite manner that the money pile attracts them? Who forces people to the debt pile, and who drags them away from the money pile? Aren't there laws for that?