IN the U.S. today, a political stance that used to be defined as liberal is called conservative, but someone with mostly illiberal views is called liberal while those who do not want progress and are in favor of “returning to nature” are known as progressives.
Social-democrats, for their part, call themselves socialists. And many of them claim that nations whose leaders declared that they were practicing socialism were not really socialist because “real socialism has never been tried,” but Norway and other Nordic nations — which have market-based economies, a.k.a. capitalism — are socialist countries.
There was a time when Marxist, that is Communist, parties were known as social democratic. Lenin led a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party that he called Bolshevik or the majority even though it was in the minority. A totalitarian nation ruled by a Leninist party usually called itself a “people’s democracy” or a “people’s republic.” Its dictatorial rule was labeled “democratic centralism.”
Orwell called it doublethink. Today, some will call it “branding.”
Politics, in any case, may be the second oldest profession, but it could actually be the first. Remember the serpent in the Garden of Eden and his “campaign promises” to Eve?
Henry David Thoreau was right. “If I knew for certain,” he once said, “that a man was coming to my house to do me good, I would run for my life.”
In a direct or representative democracy, politics involves elections, and elections, then and now, are usually about who can do what, when and how for voters.
Ancient Rome was a republic for about 500 years. Chief executives and lawmakers were elected. And candidates for office made campaign promises. When the public complained about high prices and low wages, the politicians promised to “solve” those “problems.” One of the wildly popular pro-people programs back then was the free wheat provided by the pro-people government to the people. However, the result of this “progressive” measure surprised the government. Many farmers stopped farming and joined the rest of the people who no longer worked because they were getting free wheat.
The pro-people politicians also lowered and then abolished interest on loans. The creditors, for their part, were well-versed in arithmetic so they refused to loan money. Eventually, the law banning interest was ignored.
According to economist Lawrence Reed and historian Marc Hyden, Roman politicians also gave away land to the poor, and funded the erection of their new homes and the purchase of their faming tools. “However, as soon as it was permissible, many settlers thanklessly sold their farms and returned to the city” where they could get free food from the government.
“Enormous entitlement programs also became the norm in old Rome,” Reed and Hyden wrote. “At its height, the largest state expenditure was an army of 300,000–600,000 legionaries. The soldiers realized their role and necessity in Roman politics, and consequently their demands increased. They required exorbitant retirement packages in the form of free tracts of farmland or large bonuses of gold equal to more than a decade’s worth of their salary. They also expected enormous and periodic bonuses in order to prevent uprisings.”
Ah, uprisings. Today, we call them elections.
“Rome also suffered from the bane of all welfare states, inflation,” Reed and Hyden wrote. “The massive demands on the government to spend for this and that created pressures for the creation of new money…. Flooding the economy with all this new and cheapened money had predictable results: prices skyrocketed, savings were eroded, and the people became angry and frustrated. Businessmen were often blamed for the rising prices even as government continued its spendthrift ways.”
The Roman Republic ended when Julius Caesar’s adopted son, Octavian, became the Emperor Augustus. But like the politicians of the republic, the rulers of the empire had to please the people lest they riot or, worse, rebel. One of the emperors, Diocletian, imposed price controls. He said hoarders and other violators would be put to death.
Result? “The people brought no more provisions to market, since they could not get a reasonable price for them and this increased [the scarcity] so much, that at last after many had died by it, the law was set aside.”
The Roman experience, Reed and Hyden wrote, teaches important lessons. “As the 20th century economist Howard Kershner put it, ‘When a self-governing people confer upon their government the power to take from some and give to others, the process will not stop until the last bone of the last taxpayer is picked bare.’ Putting one’s livelihood in the hands of vote-buying politicians compromises not just one’s personal independence, but the financial integrity of society as well. The welfare state, once begun, is difficult to reverse and never ends well.”
That may be true, but can humanity actually learn “important lessons” from history?
That’ll be the day.
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