(Translated by X)
I just finished reading Will Durant's *Story of Civilization*.
Eleven volumes, over thirteen thousand pages.
Durant isn't from my ideological neck of the woods—he's a classical liberal historian, no explicit ideological agenda.
And yet, in the volume on Rome, he documents something I would have signed off on without changing a single comma.
In *Caesar and Christ*, Durant describes Diocletian's economic policy in the 3rd century with cutting precision.
First, the State replaced the price system with a managed economy.
Then it controlled grain, oil, iron, salt.
Then it dictated maximum prices for all goods and services in the Empire—the Edict of Prices of 301 AD.
The result was that goods vanished from the market.
What can't be sold at a free price isn't produced or offered.
The mechanism is so simple it's embarrassing to have to explain it, and yet two thousand years later, governments keep applying the same policy with the same look of surprise when the same results roll in.
But the most devastating part isn't the Edict.
It's what came after.
To prevent people from fleeing the countryside and cities to escape taxes and regulations, the Roman State literally tied peasants to the land.
Durant calls it de facto serfdom.
Medieval feudalism, Durant argues, has its main root in the restrictions Diocletian and his successors imposed to stop people from running away.
Medieval serfdom was the logical consequence of Roman interventionism.
And to finance all this, taxes rose to levels Durant describes as unprecedented in their ubiquitous continuity.
The bureaucracy, the army, public works, and the dole had to be funded with current-year revenues because Rome hadn't yet discovered public debt as a way to disguise waste and postpone accountability.
This is key, and Durant doesn't quite see it all the way through—public debt doesn't solve the problem.
The moderns did discover it, and that's why debt replaced taxes as the extraction mechanism, with the bonus that the cost gets loaded onto generations that can't yet vote against it.
Durant sums it up like this in the volume's epilogue: the rising cost of armies, handouts, public works, an expanding bureaucracy, and a parasitic court; the debasement of the currency; the discouragement of productive capacity and the absorption of investment capital by confiscatory taxation; all of that conspired to undermine the material foundations of Italian life, until Rome's power was a political ghost surviving its own economic death.
A political ghost surviving its own economic death.
Durant wrote that in 1944.
What he describes is exactly the order of operations: price intervention, capital flight, regulatory serfdom, monetary debasement, collapse of the productive structure.
There's no mystery in Rome's fall, and there isn't in any of the ones that came after.
I've still got a lot more to read in Will Durant's *Story of Civilization*—so many volumes.