In all seriousness apart from the mining hardware race. Mining was a voluntary service given to use bitcoin much like any distributed computing projects that you can participate on using BOINC clients.
Where you get such wacky ideas I'll never know...
Back when CPU's was the thing everyone and their dog would run nodes and self mine before pools.
Simply before the migration from solo mining to pools and CPU's to GPU's and GPU's to FPGA and later ASIC's.
Satoshi never meant mining to be "a public service," hence he incentivized it. Unlike SETI@home & folding@home.
Regardless of you or I having treated it as that in the past.
A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people,
just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.