Debt, Decline, and Dictatorship – what they have in common can be seen from a page of antiquity. Concerning Rome, “Real problems began when the limits of imperial expansion were reached in the second century. With no new territories to loot, the Roman treasury became seriously overstretched, and the emperors resorted to a policy of debauching the currency to fill the gap between falling revenues and rising expenditures. By A.D. 210, the silver content of the previously pure Roman denarius was only 50% of what it had originally been; 60 years later, it was a mere 5%. The inevitable inflation that followed raised the price of a bushel of wheat from ten denarii in A.D. 200 to two million denarii in A.D. 344. As the official Roman currency became increasingly worthless, soldiers refused to be paid in it, and tax collectors refused to accept it in payment of taxes.
This collapse of the financial system led to the adoption of totalitarian solutions by a succession of Roman emperors during the third and fourth centuries.” ((For a detailed analysis of this, see Charles Adams, For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization, 2nd ed. (New York: Madison, 2001), 111-128. For a more wide-ranging analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the Roman Empire, but reaching similar conclusions, see Paul Johnson, “Cancers of the Ancient World,” in Enemies of Society (New York: Atheneum, 1977), 10-27. Accessed from Kairos 2-25-10))
