Historic Preservation in 5th Century Rome

"The spectator who casts a mournful view over the ruins of ancient Rome is tempted to accuse the memory of the Goths and Vandals for the mischief which they had neither the leisure, nor the power, nor perhaps the inclination to perpetrate. The tempest of war might strike some lofty turrets to the ground; but the destruction which undermined those massy fabrics was prosecuted slowly and silently, during a period of ten centuries; and the motives of interest, that afterwards operated without shame or control, were severely checked by the taste as well as the spirit of the emperor Majorian. The decay of the city had gradually impaired the value of the public works. The circus and theatres might still excite, but they seldom gratified, the desires of the people: the temples which had escaped the zeal of the Christians were no longer inhabited either by gods or men; the diminished crowds of the Romans were lost in the immense space of their baths and porticoes; and the stately libraries and halls of justice became useless to an indolent generation whose repose was seldom disturbed either by study or business. The monuments of consular or imperial greatness were no longer revered as the immortal glory of the capital: they were only esteemed as an inexhaustible mine of materials, cheaper, and more convenient, than the distant quarry. Specious petitions were continually addressed to the easy magistrates of Rome which stated the want of stones or bricks for some necessary service: the fairest forms of architecture were rudely defaced for the sake of some paltry or pretended repairs; and the degenerate Romans, who converted the spoil to their own emolument, demolished, with sacrilegious hands, the labours of their ancestors. Majorian, who had often sighed over the desolation of the city, applied a severe remedy to the growing evil. He reserved to the prince and the senate the sole cognizance of the extreme cases which might justify the destruction of an ancient edifice; imposed a fine of fifty pounds of gold (two thousands pounds sterling) on every magistrate who should presume to grant such illegal and scandalous licence; and threatened to chastise the criminal obedience of their subordinate officers by a severe whipping and the amputation of both their hands. In the last instance the legislator might seem to forget the proportion of guilt and punishment; but his zeal arose from a generous principle, and Majorian was anxious to protect the monuments of those ages in which he would have desired and deserved to live."

Edward Gibbon, 1737-1794; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Volume II pp 315-316.

The Ecology of Taxes

"Taxes are what we pay for civilized society."

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The opponents of Federal Income Tax withholding, when it was first proposed, claimed the process of withholding would make the payment of taxes too easy and painless and would deprive the taxpayer of the knowledge of the real effect of taxes. Paying the taxes in full each April, they explained, would give the taxpayer the real pain of the tax and would more likely result in citizen protests of the waste of tax money.

The argument is quaint these days. We went so far as to use the excess payment of withholding as a form of savings. (See Billion Dollar Boondoggle, WE THE PEOPLE, October 1988.). The switch the Reagan Administration pulled was to run the government by reducing taxes.

What ever economic theory the Reagan Administration employed will be a matter of speculation for decades as the history of this administration is written. Supply side economics was the popular term, although it's not clear whether it was just a slogan. The Laffer curve was supposed to explain how one got more taxes by cutting taxes, but reality never caught up with the theory.

We hear the President cry that opponents of his budget and tax plans simply "Tax and spend." The only way his program can be described is "Borrow and spend." We have a trillion dollar military build up on borrowed money. This administration has borrowed so much money that the interest on the debt is a major item of the debt and there is no plan in sight to reduce the debt and the debt keeps growing. All that both the President and Congress are doing is trying to reduce the rate of indebtedness.

A frequent criticism of our Allies is they are not carrying their fair share of the defense of the free world. What is shocking is the knowledge that our Allies are carrying our debt. We are borrowing tons of money from Japan and Europe to finance our government. Why are we borrowing money to finance our government instead of supporting our government through taxes? It's painless. Borrow now, let future generations pay later. This policy of borrowing, together with our trade policy have produced levels of indebtedness unprecedented in the history of the world. We are paying billions in interest to nations that have the money to lend us because they run huge trade surpluses with us. This indebtedness is having a profound influence on the course of our national development.

One Japanese financial institution spends one billion dollars a month on U. S. real estate. Foreign holdings on the New York Stock exchange have risen from 4 billion to 17 billion and the end is not in sight. We have all been aware that Arab oil money was being invested heavily in the U.S. but we have not seen such an onslaught as from our trading partners. Foreign manufacturing plants are being built in the United States and foreign investors are buying U. S. industry. The positioning of this mass of foreign investment in the infrastructure of the United States may make it more difficult to repay the debt.

Space Shuttle Columbia

What ever induced the Reagan administration to borrow for the military build up instead of paying for it with taxes, may never be known. Were we supposed to be defense poor so we couldn't afford social programs? Were we supposed to see a restructuring of the government along lines that would reduce the Federal role to defense and foreign policy? What ever the impetus the long term strategic effect may be a significant loss of our economic hegemony and consequently a significant loss of our economic independence.

Losing the economic wars will be far more catastrophic than Korea or Vietnam. One day we will not only see statistics of how much of our hourly earnings go to taxes but how much goes to Japan and Western Europe to pay our foreign debts. By borrowing and spending instead of taxing and spending we have found a painless way to finance a trillion dollar defense build up (but with no mine sweepers), but the American people have been deprived participation In a process that will profoundly affect our way of life.

It is a paradox of American politics that a conservative Republican president, may have changed forever the course of our national development by carrying the country into debt, so vast and profound, that its ecology is not understood. By living extravagantly beyond our means, amassing a debt that may have a life or its own, certainly one that will not be repaid in this generation, we are closing and limiting options for our national development. We may have sacrificed our economic hegemony over our obsession with communism.

The world system is a harsh and unforgiving environment for those who do not understand it. And in the end taxing and spending may well have been fiscal responsibility and borrowing and spending may well have been fiscal irresponsibility. Borrowing trillions may well have been reckless irresponsibility.

... Ted Sudia ...

© Copyright 1988
Institute for domestic Tranquility