There's no such thing as a free lunch, and other bullshit lies we tell each other.

For millennia, human society functioned in small closely linked groups of oh, a few dozen people. We took care of each other’s children; we shared food with each other. We helped our elderly and infirm.

We brought each other soup and sewed up each other’s torn footwear and threaded needles for each other and braided each other’s hair, and everybody had a pretty good idea of who contributed to the commonweal and who was a freeloader or a scam artist.

This is not to say that no-one was ever exploited, because of course exploitation is a common element in all human societies. Abused captives, marginalized classes of people, and the overlooked are nothing new. I’m not in any way arguing for some primal state of grace in nature here: people are going to people.