Do you know they even had a Transportation Act back there, prescribing the fee required to rent one laden jackass per mile and at today’s rate of exchange it would have amounted to about 1/8th cent per mile? Which meant that in order to make a profit a jack ass would have to carry five passengers? That was simply beyond the capacity of the jack ass. Diocletian put millions of people on the public payroll, but when this failed to do the job, the country was still in trouble, he asked more personal powers for himself. For a brief while, incidentally, they were standby powers, but then he used them, all at once. He froze wages, he froze prices, he froze jobs, he stopped profits, he dictated to the farmer what he should plant, when and how he should sell it and for how much and he rationed food and what happened? The labor market closed down, incentive was gone. Farm life became dependent on bureaucratic red tape.

Exorbitant taxes cost the farmer his land. He kept for himself only a small plot on which he might grow turnips for his family. He lost the rest of it to the state and without food and with incentive gone city life stagnated and declined. And Rome past into what history has recorded as the “Dark Ages” lasting a thousand years. Just by turning to the left, the world has gone in circles. A nation would evolve from a monarchy, into an oligarchy, from oligarchy to dictatorship, from dictatorship to bureaucracy, from bureaucracy to pure democracy where, finally, the people would cry out from the chaos and confusion of the streets “Oh! Please God give us a king!” And God would give ’em a king and they’d have a monarchy again and start the whole silly cycle anew. Now either we will profit from the errors of their ways, or it follows as the night the day, our children are going to have to relive the dark ages, all over again. How come after thousands of years of experiment our new nation has come so far, so fast?