What Republicans do

[pbrower2a]

(06-04-2017, 08:22 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: It's plausible that the decline in the purchasing power of the currency of an empire is a sign of its decline, but citing Rome is a poor example because there were many causes for and signs of its decline. I don't know what other examples he could cite. Gold is irrelevant; it's just a symbol just like any currency. Those of us on the liberal side cite "the increasing concentration of wealth and political power in fewer hands and the deterioration of democracy" as brower did. We have the facts about which policies of which Party have actually helped the most people; it's clear that, as Bill Clinton said, "our way works better."

The debasement of the coin of the Roman Empire was a symptom, and not a cause. Governments can get away with expanding the money supply so long as the overall society is producing enough stuff that precious metals do not matter. The Romans mined much of their own silver and gold.  Precious metals can themselves lose value rapidly in the wake of their discovery (the California and South African gold rushes) or mass theft (as with the Spanish looting of the gold of the Aztec and Inca empires).

Wikipedia has a collection of explanations of the decay of the Roman Empire. One is mine (even if it has been amended some):

Quote:In contrast with the declining empire theories, historians such as Arnold J. Toynbee and James Burke argue that the Roman Empire itself was a rotten system from its inception, and that the entire Imperial era was one of steady decay of institutions founded in Republican times. In their view, the Empire could never have lasted longer than it did without radical reforms that no Emperor could implement. The Romans had no budgetary system and thus wasted whatever resources they had available. The economy of the Empire was a Raubwirtschaft or plunder economy based on looting existing resources rather than producing anything new. The Empire relied on riches from conquered territories (this source of revenue ending, of course, with the end of Roman territorial expansion) or on a pattern of tax collection that drove small-scale farmers into destitution (and onto a dole that required even more exactions upon those who could not escape taxation), or into dependency upon a landed élite exempt from taxation. With the cessation of tribute from conquered territories, the full cost of their military machine had to be borne by the citizenry.

An economy based upon slave labor precluded a middle class with buying power. The Roman Empire produced few exportable goods. Material innovation, whether through entrepreneurialism or technological advancement, all but ended long before the final dissolution of the Empire. Meanwhile, the costs of military defense and the pomp of Emperors continued. Financial needs continued to increase, but the means of meeting them steadily eroded. In the end, due to economic failure, even the armor and weaponry of soldiers became so obsolete that the enemies of the Empire had better armor and weapons as well as larger forces. The decrepit social order offered so little to its subjects that many saw the barbarian invasion as liberation from onerous obligations to the ruling class.

By the late 5th century the barbarian conqueror Odoacer had no use for the formality of an Empire upon deposing Romulus Augustus and chose neither to assume the title of Emperor himself nor to select a puppet, although legally he kept the lands as a commander of the Eastern Empire and maintained the Roman institutions such as the consulship. The formal end of the Roman Empire on the West in AD 476 thus corresponds with the time in which the Empire and the title Emperor no longer had value.

In essence, needs surpass means and the system demands far more than it can offer, the usual signals of final collapse. That is how Byzantine Empire, the Confederacy, the Romanov dynasty in Russia, and Nazi Germany came to their ends -- and how the United States of America will come to an end, but we are obviously far away from the level of decrepitude even of the latter years of the Roman Republic.


Here is the whole article.

I had also suggested the poor educational system, one unable to maintain the Roman system of command as the Latin language deteriorated enough to create confusion between word forms. Such was not a problem in areas in which the Greek, Aramaic, or Coptic languages prevailed. The case system of classical Latin decayed as certain vowels became  confused; the verbal conjugations became a mess as the Latin sounds of b and v  (which were like English b and w in the time of Julius Caesar) both merged as a sound like English v , which allowed the confusion of past and future tenses. Wikipedia editors rejected that one for lack of evidence.  

This ought to make Galen happy:

Quote:Historian Michael Rostovtzeff and economist Ludwig von Mises both argued that unsound economic policies played a key role in the impoverishment and decay of the Roman Empire. According to them, by the 2nd century AD, the Roman Empire had developed a complex market economy in which trade was relatively free. Tariffs were low and laws controlling the prices of foodstuffs and other commodities had little impact because they did not fix the prices significantly below their market levels. After the 3rd century, however, debasement of the currency (i.e., the minting of coins with diminishing content of gold, silver, and bronze) led to inflation. The price control laws then resulted in prices that were significantly below their free-market equilibrium levels. It should, however, be noted that Constantine initiated a successful reform of the currency which was completed before the barbarian invasions of the 4th century, and that thereafter the currency remained sound everywhere that remained within the empire until at least the 11th century - at any rate for gold coins.

According to Rostovtzeff and Mises, artificially low prices led to the scarcity of foodstuffs, particularly in cities, whose inhabitants depended on trade to obtain them. Despite laws passed to prevent migration from the cities to the countryside, urban areas gradually became depopulated and many Roman citizens abandoned their specialized trades to practice subsistence agriculture. This, coupled with increasingly oppressive and arbitrary taxation, led to a severe net decrease in trade, technical innovation, and the overall wealth of the Empire.[9]

Bruce Bartlett traces the beginning of debasement to the reign of Nero. He claims that the emperors increasingly relied on the army as the sole source of their power, and therefore their economic policy was driven more and more by a desire to increase military funding in order to buy the army's loyalty. By the 3rd century, according to Bartlett, the monetary economy had collapsed. But the imperial government was now in a position where it had to satisfy the demands of the army at all costs. Failure to do so would result in the army forcibly deposing the emperor and installing a new one. Therefore, being unable to increase monetary taxes, the Roman Empire had to resort to direct requisitioning of physical goods anywhere it could find them - for example taking food and cattle from farmers. The result, in Bartlett's view, was social chaos, and this led to different responses from the authorities and from the common people. The authorities tried to restore order by requiring free people (i.e. non-slaves) to remain in the same occupation or even at the same place of employment. Eventually, this practice was extended to force children to follow the same occupation as their parents. So, for instance, farmers were tied to the land, and the sons of soldiers had to become soldiers themselves. Many common people reacted by moving to the countryside, sometimes joining the estates of the wealthy, and in general trying to be self-sufficient and interact as little as possible with the imperial authorities. Thus, according to Bartlett, Roman society began to dissolve into a number of separate estates that operated as closed systems, provided for all their own needs and did not engage in trade at all. These were the beginnings of feudalism.[10]

But note that debasement of the currency was a symptom of a failing economy and a failing political system.