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Inflation has been with us a long time. If you know your history you’ll know that the devastating consequences are an old story Authentic Budda Baker Jersey , retold repeatedly. It is armies that allow rulers to rule and money provides the means to buy and maintain armies. If you have enough guns (or swords, spears, etc) to rule a society you have enough to take control of the money supply. After that, inflation follows like night after day. The Roman Empire offers a fine illustration.


Between the regimes of Augustus and Diocletian Roman troop numbers more than doubled: from 250,000 to 600,000. An indication of the degree to which inflation funded this massive military is the fate of the Roman currency Authentic Haason Reddick Jersey , the denarius. It was so utterly debased by a long string of Roman rulers that, when Diocletian came to power, the formerly silver coin was reduced to a copper plated token. By A.D. 268 it had fallen to one five-thousandth of its original value. Roman trade was already deteriorating into barter. Meanwhile, the middle class was rapidly eroding.


Not a fool, Diocletian fully appreciated the costs of this centuries long currency debasement and responded by declaring that taxes were no longer to be paid in coin, but in goods. What he of course never did was return the denarius to a money worth its weight in silver. Rather Authentic Patrick Peterson Jersey , he presumed to fix the effects rather than the cause. To this end he imposed a wide range of price, wage, production and anti-hoarding rules.


Most notorious and draconian among these impositions were those in his infamous A.D. 301 Edict. Therein it decreed that those who violated the controls were to be punished by death. There is some dispute among historians as to how responsible his Edict was for the subsequent bloodshed in the Empire. What isn’t in dispute was the continuing inflation-driven economic collapse. Inflation ran on unabated. This was illustrated in the continuing free fall of the denarius’ value: set by Diocletian in A.D. 301 at 50,000 per pound of gold, by 337, the year of Constantine’s death Authentic Larry Fitzgerald Jersey , that same pound of gold purchased 20,000,000 denarii!


Over the subsequent century, the situation became so untenable that Romans abandoned the market entirely. Some fled. Others entered voluntary serfdom. Indeed, the feudal system, often depicted as a result of the fall of Rome Authentic Chandler Jones Jersey , in reality, arose in the bosom of Rome, in response to a monetary economy crippled by a currency nearing worthlessness.


Certainly, explanatory efforts to pinpoint any single cause for an event as epic as the fall of Rome would be too simplistic. There can be no doubt, however, those centuries of economic deterioration played an important role. Indeed Authentic Josh Rosen Jersey , the common practice of portraying the barbarian invasions as a conquest is a bit misleading. For the majority of the Roman lower class – a category into which much of the middle class had fallen – the sackers of Rome were not conquers, but liberators: liberation from the denarius.


Those seeking insights for the contemporary world can find everything they need to know in this tale. A good generated out of the market for common benefit is corrupted by power and coercion . Coercive rulers (however serving of the people and the common good they claim themselves to be) transform the money from a market-valued currency into a coercively decreed value. This is what fiat means. The money is legally required to be treated as being worth something it simply is not. No less than in the story of the Emperor’s new clothes, the people are required to pretend the patently false is unquestionably true, while the rulers skim off the actual value to pay the armies which allow them to run the whole scam from the start.