BY DR. JOSE PALU-AY DACUDAO
SINCE there was no check on the capital city’s power, Rome historically just kept on milking her provinces of taxes until the peoples of the provinces hardly had any incentive to produce. What would be the use of producing a harvest if you knew that most of it would go to taxes? Better to go to Rome itself and receive free dole outs in the Coliseum during the gladiatorial games, the Roman equivalent of our showbiz entertainment. Thus, economic production in the provinces would drop.
Rome would respond by seeking new territory to conquer and to plunder. Once it stopped expanding, its economy had a tendency to collapse.
Rome epitomized the problems of the huge Unitarian state. Such a state is invariably governed from a center, which grows more and more powerful and richer at the expense of its peripheries. The center becomes cannibalistic. With little or no check to its power, the center tends to drain its peripheries/provinces of money, goods, and services, through various mechanisms including legal tribute and taxation systems. Since its peripheries tend to fall in production, once such a state stops expanding, it can support its economy usually only by engaging in economic imperialism in countries outside its borders, or by direct invasion, colonialism, and plunder of new territories.
In federal countries, the local states, given the incentive of retaining most of the fruits of their economic activity, usually maintain high productivity, so that the entire system’s economy is maintained.
Augustus Caesar and the succeeding Roman Emperors kept on expanding the Empire that succeeded the Roman Republic. Sooner or later, given the Empire’s centralized nature, it had to collapse. By the beginning of the 4th century, dictatorial centralized Rome had extreme difficulty in paying its army, which was its main instrument of control. Eventually, the underpaid army had to pull out off the provinces, which were quickly invaded by tribal nomadic peoples (called by the highly cultured Romans as ‘barbarians’).
395 AD – At the death of Emperor Theodosius I, the Roman Empire was permanently divided into a western and eastern portion.
476 AD – Germanic Gothic troops in Italy rebelled and deposed of the western Empire’s last Roman ruler Romulus Augustulus, replacing him with the Goth Odoacer.
Thus the Roman Empire ended.
Rome gave us a model for Representative Democracy. We adhere to democratic ideals because of Rome’s example. Much of our laws have their origins in Rome’s legal codes. The Americans copied Rome’s Republican system, and that system was imposed on us.
What did Rome miss, that the Americans did not?
Under the leadership of George Washington, the Americans instituted the first modern Federation. Romans seemed not to have thought of it at all.
In the American Federation, there are no provinces. Every state is legally co equal. There is no primate city such as Metro Manila that acts as a dictator to the provinces the way Rome the City did.
The autonomous states in a Federation such as the USA also have all the incentive to produce goods and services for the reason that they retain most of their taxes. Plunder by a primate city is checked.
If the Roman Republic had developed the Federal system, who knows what would have happened. There would have been no power concentration in Rome that could have attracted power grabbers, because power would have been devolved to local states typical of Federations. There would have been no Empire; instead there would have been a politically stable, economically productive Roman Federation that treated its diverse ethnic peoples with respect.
Federations are the most stable polities in history. Perhaps, if things had gone otherwise, such a Roman Federation would be in existence until today, and courageous statesmen such as Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus would still admired as the avatar of democratic ideals and self-sacrifice./PN
