Professional bullying

I'm pretty sure you can tell the difference between the two.

> I'm pretty sure you can tell the difference between the two.

Paying money so you don’t get roughed up looks pretty much the same whether it’s a bandit or a king doing it.

Here in the US there aren't a lot of kings, but if you have the fortune of living in a commonwealth nation, you're free to get rid of yours.

Unless you're in the UK, though, King Charles is not exactly asking for anything from you.

Banditry is when the baddies drop by periodically to demand a portion of your labor on threat of violence. Government is when they don’t leave.

the last guy who stole an Amazon box off my porch didn't put up a school for my kids, the road in front of my house, help the homeless guy I gave my second burger to the other day get out of the cold, make sure the water out of my tap didn't kill me, etc

Many large drug cartels pay for schools, give out food to the poor, and control some forms of crime to increase public support or at least prevent their protest.

Once organized crime gets big enough, it's really difficult to distinguish from a weak government.

Sure and many feudal warlords grew the same way but at some point the Castle decayed away and became a tourist destination and what was left behind was the community and governance.

Once organized crime gets really big, it stops being crime and persists on organization alone.

I agree, but I would argue that the label of "crime" is mostly semantics. The violence (or at least the threat of violence) of the crimes still persists, but whoever is the most powerful group gets to change the label of their violence from "crime" to "law enforcement".

We call those "paragovernamental organizations", for obvious reasons.

If they get too powerful, we just drop the "para" on that name.

Yeah, there is a huge difference between opportunist petty thiefs and organized crime bosses.