It is one of the oddities of empire that as entrenched elites become wealthier and the common people become more impoverished due to the concentration of wealth, the elites suddenly decide that they don't have to pay taxes. Various Chinese dynasties fell because of this, as did the Roman empire -- Rome fell because Rome's elites decided they no longer wished to pay taxes for the support of the legions that protected them from barbarians, and the legions responded, when not paid, by marching on Rome and installing one of themselves as Emperor for a while until the elites could figure out how to get him out of there. Or by deserting under the "no pay, no play" rule. It got to the point where they assassinated their last competent general for making the mistake of coming to Rome *without* his legion to ask for his pay. The end result was that Rome went from being a city of over 1,000,000 in 300 AD to being maybe 40,000 people huddled in a heavily-armed camp in the ruins by 500 AD. Where did everybody else go? The smarter ones moved to the country and learned how to be subsistence farmers. The rest died, including most of those elites who thought they were immune to reality by virtue of their wealth and birth. Didn't quite work that way. Duh.
So it goes, as our own elites go down that same damned path to mass extinction. Taking the rest of us with them, alas, the way it usually goes.
The interesting thing is that the city of Rome likely would have been abandoned totally, if not for the fact that the Bishop of the Western Catholic Church lived there. For some reason the barbarians took to Christianity like a pig to a mud hole. When all but clerics and a few warlords are subsistence farmers, there simply isn't anything to keep them in a city once the infrastructure of empire is gone, and plenty of reasons (like good soil and pasturage and access to firewood) to be elsewhere.
ReplyDelete- Badtux the History Penguin
"Most emperors continued the policies of debasement and increasingly heavy taxes, levied mainly on the wealthy. The war against wealth was not simply due to purely fiscal requirements, but was also part of a conscious policy of exterminating the Senatorial class, which had ruled Rome since ancient times, in order to eliminate any potential rivals to the emperor."
ReplyDelete"As the private wealth of the Empire was gradually confiscated or taxed away, driven away or hidden, economic growth slowed to a virtual standstill. Moreover, once the wealthy were no longer able to pay the state's bills, the burden inexorably fell onto the lower classes, so that average people suffered as well from the deteriorating economic conditions. In Rostovtzeff's words, 'The heavier the pressure of the state on the upper classes, the more intolerable became the condition of the lower' (Rostovtzeff 1957: 430)." [Emphasis added]
Source: Bartlett, Bruce. "How Excessive Government Killed Ancient Rome", The Cato Journal, Vol. 14, No. 2, Fall 1994
Are you joking, CT? Quoting a 17 year old article from the Cato Institute (founded and funded by the far right-wing Koch brothers).
ReplyDeleteIf anything, this just proves Badtux's point. The ultra-rich (like the Koch brothers) just don't want to pay taxes.
Bruce Bartlett is a tool. He supported the war in Iraq until after Bush's own hand-picked weapons inspector certified there were no WMD (a year after the initial phase of the war), he claimed that there was no housing bubble even up until the point it was popping, and otherwise has all the credibility of Baghdad Bob. He is a "right-wing economist" according to his profile on the NYT site, which means, basically, that he's a hack. He's certainly not a historian, or he would understand the origins of the manorial system and how tax farming *actually* worked, as vs. how it worked in his deranged imagination.
ReplyDelete- Badtux the History Penguin
"Quoting a 17 year old article ..."
ReplyDelete... about ancient Rome.
You're certainly welcome to believe that a someone from a libertarian think tank has a political agenda, even when analyzing ancient history, but explain to me how being 17 years closer in time to the era being discussed somehow invalidates the analysis?
I'm not an archeologist, so maybe I'm missing something. What's been unearthed about the Roman Empire since 1994 that negates Bartlett's position?
I didn't even get into the debasement policies of the Roman Empire (can you say "quantitative easement")?
You're right about the 17 years, CT. The article would have been equally as stupid and wrong if it had been written yesterday.
ReplyDeleteHere's something Bruce Bartlett said - not yesterday, but the day before yesterday - on MSNBC's Hardball:
ReplyDelete"I think a good chunk of the Republican caucus is either stupid, crazy, ignorant or craven cowards, who are desperately afraid of the tea party people, and rightly so."
Here's the source.
Bruce Bartlett: "Stupid and wrong."
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day ;).
ReplyDelete- Badtux the Snarky Penguin