Things Never Change

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

Eric Falkenstein is reading a military and political history of Rome that he finds interesting and depressing, because it demonstrates that things never change:

All the dysfunctional diagnoses and remedies, leading to decline. You get the feeling society’s optimal sphere of military control was greater than its optimal governance size, making most of its last 5 centuries a disequilibria of waxing and waning coalitions and dynasties. I don’t think our politics is much better. Certainly, the best of the Romans are better than most modern politicians, but bit by bit they misunderstood what was sustainable, how to balance authority with sustainable power. Eventually it was no longer Holy, Roman, or an Empire.

What was most interesting was the part on how Romans needed to raise money, but had to resort to debasing the currency by decreasing the amount of silver in their money, which really took off in the third century AD. As prices rose they were totally flummoxed as to the cause, and blamed this on ‘greed’, a common enough political response in the twentieth century to excessive money growth. But fundamentally, there was no solution because the size of the Empire was larger than could be sustained, and monetizing the debt was a symptom of this problem. No politician gets power saying we should do less, the assumption is always that a state can achieve whatever it wants if it tries really really hard. Blaming symptoms we don’t like, such as greed and hubris, is a constant refrain. Some things never change.

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