I do not get the obsession with fall of Rome being a bad thing. Look at taxation, look at big part of population being in slavery. Their military machine, roads and civilisation was basically just to crash rebelions!

Today we have taxation around 30 to 70 percent. Imagine if taxes would be at 10% and we would not have to sponsor all sort of "adventures".

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matusp 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The standard of living in Rome was not surpassed for more than a millennium. Large parts of the empire were at peace for centuries, allowing economy and trade to thrive. Many provinces that were peaceful and prosperous were ravaged by wars, ethnic conflicts, and plagues for many centuries after the fall.

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CoastalCoder 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's an interesting point and worth discussing.

I'm not sure why you got down voted. Maybe people are perceiving some subtext that I'm not.

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TalkingCodeMonk 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I'm not sure why you got down voted. Maybe people are perceiving some subtext that I'm not.

Probably because the vast majority of politicians who attack taxation do so specifically to destroy social programs and quality of life multipliers, instead of the war machine or any other area of bearucratic waste, inefficiency, or corruption.

For example "No new wars" becomes "No, new wars!" and all the people who screamed about government spending clap as the military spend doubles, or feign disgust but fall in line eventually because "the other guy would've done the same" as admitting they were wrong or conned is inconceivable.

Also, literally nobody is paying a 70% effective tax rate anywhere. I'd be surprised if you could find anyone paying more than 50% without misinformation. Even when taxes were 90% for a short period of time, for an extreme minority, there were loopholes that meant none of them ever paid anything close to 90%.

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cucumber3732842 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>I'm not sure why you got down voted

Because he questioned taxes and the weekend crowd thinks that's heretical and won't even entertain the discussion of why things are that way let alone whether they're good or bad.

	▲	satvikpendem 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I had just the sort of discussion you're talking about on that big thread about PG's "how to make a billion dollars article," where for some reason people couldn't even fathom that there was even a way to tell whether certain taxes are good or bad, and couldn't understand the logic of doing so. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48526360#48527840

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riffraff 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

taxes were very low for the majority of civilization and war was way more prevalent than it is today.