Nov. 25, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
07:48
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| So... | |
| Continuing the tragic story of the decline under Constantine, 308-337 AD, where he continued Diocletian's policies, economic control, central planning, all of that god-awful Soviet-style mess that is crippling Western economies at the moment. | |
| So he even more tightly lashed and bound workers and their descendants to the land or to their occupation. | |
| So it became that you had to do what your father did, and you had to stay on the land your grandfather worked in. | |
| This, of course, was the basis for what turned into the medieval practice of serfdom. | |
| In 332, Constantine ordered, quote, Any person in whose possession a tenant that belongs to another is found, not only shall restore the aforesaid tenant to his place of origin, but also shall assume the capitation tax for this man for the time that he was with him. | |
| Tenants also who meditate flight may be bound with chains and reduced to a servile condition, so that by virtue of a servile condemnation they shall be compelled to fulfill the duties that befit free men. | |
| Yeah, we chain you should you leave your livestock enclosure of tax collection, but we're going to say that that's because you're oh so free. | |
| This is a terrible death cycle. | |
| Government controls lead to more distortions, lead to more government controls until either they're repealed or the society craters completely. | |
| So despite such efforts, or perhaps because I would argue of such efforts, the land continued to be abandoned and trade mostly collapsed. | |
| People just wanted to get away from the bullying, the control, the fear, the anxiety, the sword to the throat, the chains, the bindings, the taxes, the destruction of this increasingly dangerous and destructive empire. | |
| Industry moved out to the provinces. | |
| Back in the day, it's really hard to tax people who are in the country. | |
| It's relatively easy to tax people in the city, which is why people leave the city and go to the country, because they get to escape the sort of, I don't know, martial law net of economic controls that Rome had. | |
| And so this industry moving out to the provinces, we see this with a hollowing out of inner cities, and this is relatively close to what is outsourcing, where one of the reasons why America and a lot of the West can't produce its own goods domestically, why like Of apparel manufacturing in America, only 3% is done in America. | |
| Well, because of regulations and controls and union laws and high taxes, America has extraordinarily high corporate taxes. | |
| And so America is Rome and the country is the outsourcing that comes from America. | |
| They're just trying to escape the regulation. | |
| So it left Rome economically kind of an empty shell. | |
| So it was still taking in taxes, taking in the grain and other goods that were produced in the provinces that had to be paid in kind, but it was producing almost nothing itself. | |
| And of course, this makes people kind of resentful. | |
| You know, when people look at particular areas where lots of people on welfare, they're like, eh, I'm not really that happy that all my taxes is going to this stuff because it doesn't really, really help. | |
| Now, the dependent mobs in Rome, the ones who were dependent on the bread and circuses provided by the government and the military-industrial complex, produced nothing but always demanded more, leading to an increased insane tax burden on the productive citizens. | |
| Now, some historians have pointed out that, from an economic point of view, the fact that the state was massively attempting to increase and collect these taxes, well, what did the taxpayers do? | |
| Ah, the more star systems you tried to grip, the more will fall through your hands, right? | |
| It's like trying to grab a soap in a rainstorm. | |
| There was more burden placed upon people just trying to avoid taxes than the actual taxes themselves. | |
| They would move, they would change occupations, they would go into the black market, they would flee the cities, and so just having to avoid the crazy taxes became more burdensome and people resented it more than the taxes themselves. | |
| The heavy taxes that were applied to farm output has shown that land, rent, and real wages fell during this period. | |
| And this, you know, the 1% gets richer. | |
| This was the same in Rome as well, right? | |
| So much of the economic gains over the past 20 years have accumulated to the top 1%, certainly in America. | |
| So rich people, you could get away from taxes. | |
| You could either legally or illegally find ways around it. | |
| You could shuffle your assets. | |
| You could bribe people to get out of their taxes. | |
| But the ordinary citizen did not have that political connected ability to avoid those taxes, and they were pretty much helpless against these increasingly brutal tax collectors. | |
| In the 50 years after Diocletian, the tax burden on Romans roughly doubled, so small farmers could no longer live on their own domestic production. | |
| And this led to the final breakdown of the economy. | |
| As Lactantius put it, quote, the number of recipients began to exceed the number of contributors by so much that with farmers' resources exhausted by the enormous size of their acquisitions, fields became deserted and cultivated land was turned into forest. | |
| Right? | |
| As the parasites overwhelmed the host, You have huge problems. | |
| So, up to a third, about a third, of the people in Rome at certain periods were dependent on the state for their survival. | |
| And as Mitt Romney pointed out, I think it was in 2012, it's pretty hard for Republicans to get elected because close to half of the American population rely on the state for all or significant portions of their income, so why would they vote for a shrinkage of the state? | |
| So state revenues became too small to maintain defense, and so they cranked up more taxes, increased the sales tax from 1% to 4.5% in 444 AD, and taxpayers invested crazy amounts of time and effort in money evading taxes rather than actually doing productive work further shrinking state revenues. | |
| And taxpayers eventually evaded taxation by withdrawing from society altogether. | |
| And this is the MGTOW phenomenon. | |
| This is the tens of millions of people who are simply out of the American labor force or the labor force in the West. | |
| This is the people who graduate from college and live with their parents and play video games and don't get married, don't have kids. | |
| This is happening in the modern world as well, which is why, at least among Europeans or whites, there is such a catastrophic decline. | |
| And this is also happening after 20 years of a zombie economy in Japan, where they've tried all of the same crap that the Romans tried. | |
| Young Japanese people are simply withdrawing from dating, from sex, from having families, from having kids, and they just withdraw from society because The way that you compel obedience to society is you have like a prize. | |
| Hey, if you obey the rules, you get income, you get a house, you get a car, you get... | |
| But if society doesn't have the dingleberries to dangle like the carrots to dangle in front of people to compel obedience or submission to social norms, people don't want to submit to social norms because it just feels humiliating rather than productive. | |
| And this is the road to serfdom. | |
| Large, powerful landowners were able to avoid or reduce taxation through legal or illegal means, and they began to organize small communities around them that relied upon their protection. | |
| Small landowners were crushed into bankruptcy by heavy taxes, and they threw themselves on the mercy of the large landowners, signing their freedoms away as tenants or even becoming slaves, signing away their absolute freedom, becoming slaves because slaves, of course, were not taxed. | |
| In 368 AD, Emperor Valens declared it illegal to renounce one's liberty in order to place oneself under the protection of a powerful landlord. |
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