Diocletian's Curse

"Inflation was a huge, intractable problem, which Diocletian lacked the economic ingenuity to control. He tried, and failed, to fix prices by issuing edicts limiting both wages and the scale price of every sort of commodity and service. An army modius of ground millet, for instance, would cost 100 denarii; a pound of best-quality pork leg, 20 denarii;oysters, a denarius each, and so on. An arithmetic teacher was to earn 75 denarii per month; a carpenter, 50 per day; a scribe, "for second-quality writing," 20 denarii per 100 lines; a lawyer 1000 denarii for pleading a case, and a checkroom attendant in a bathhouse, 2 denarii per person. None of this worked, it merely produced a runaway black market."  Robert Hughes, Rome. p. 129.

I love this paragraph. Notably because it points out what I've argued on this blog. Specifically, calling for higher taxes and regulation or "fixing" is the result of the lack of our imagination. It's our default set button. Somehow, we've apparently amassed an economic "body of evidence" proving this crap works. Ostensibly it does for the people who create it and who choose to look away afterwards; neglecting to observe the result; or the unintended consequence.

La, la, la, la...I'm not listening...extremist! Racist!

It's a lot how when we were kids we justified a statistic to defend the quality of a favorite team or player. As time goes on, as you mature, you begin to dissect, scrutinize and eventually learn that sometimes our premise was faulty or plain wrong.

I remember when I was nine years-old I briefly became a Buffalo Sabres fan for some reason. In my mind, they were the best team based on current realities at the time. Maybe I liked Danny Gare or something.

I was mentally myopic as any kid is. Until my neighbor, four years my senior, grabbed a sports almanac and pointed out that the Sabres actually never won a Stanley Cup having mustered only one appearance back in the mid-70s losing to the Flyers.

I was incredulous and tried to find some fact to the contrary but I was no match for reality.

I'm stretching a little here I understand, but hey.

Price controls. Interventionism. Minimum wage. Permits. Etc.

All illusions. We've come to accept them as not.

We've tricked ourselves into believing they work but in reality they don't. They hamper true, free economic activity. All they do is drive things underground, create a corruptive attitude for those in control and make criminals of free peoples. It then becomes "industry" for the state.

I won't get into the silliness of fixing prices and how distorts things. That should be self-evident by now.

We never learn.

Let's call it Diocletian's Curse.