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| Tax Lawyer Barbara Edmonds vs Emperor Justinian I - Nolo Contendere: False historical explanations of pivotal events are very far from being inconsequential. |
WHEN BARBARA EDMONDS made reference to the Roman Empire, my ears pricked up. It is, lamentably, very rare to hear a politician admit to any kind of familiarity with the past – especially the distant past. To hear Labour’s shadow Minister of Finance offer the career of the Emperor Justinian as a cautionary tale about the dangers of excessive taxation was refreshing – and profoundly disappointing.
Rounding off his interview with Edmonds on the current affairs programme Q+A, Jack Tame asked: “What does tax policy have to do with the fall of the Roman Empire?” Edmonds responded:
When I was going through Law School, I was also doing some ancient history papers. And, basically, Emperor Justinian. It was the fall of the Roman Empire because, basically, they had to over-tax people to pay for the war and for the [indistinct]. So, the lesson I learned from that was that if you over-tax people, well, in Justinian’s case, it broke down an empire.
Sadly, none of this is true.
The Emperor Justinian ruled over the Eastern Roman Empire – better known to history as the Byzantine Empire – from 527-565 AD. Far from presiding over the fall of the Roman Empire, Justinian and his generals recovered many of the Western Empire’s lost provinces – an achievement which dramatically boosted Byzantine tax revenues. Justinian used this surplus income to construct the extraordinary Christian basilica of Hagia Sophia. This, the Emperor’s most tangible legacy, still stands in the heart of Istanbul (converted, now, to a mosque). Justinian’s other great legacy, known as the Justinian Code, still serves as the foundation of Europe’s legal system. The Byzantine Empire did fall – but not for almost another thousand years. Its mighty walled capital, Constantinople, was besieged and conquered by the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
No one academically equipped to lecture students in ancient history – especially classical history – could possibly have got the story of the Emperor Justinian so wrong. Clearly, Edmonds has misremembered the content of her ancient history course.
“Hardly a hanging offence!”, the ordinary voter would doubtless respond. “Most people don’t know anything about Justinian, or his empire, and care even less!” True enough, but they do care about being over-taxed. So, if Labour’s finance spokesperson cites the deeds of some long-dead dude as a warning from the past against taxing citizens too hard, then that same ordinary voter is likely to store her (mis)information in the back of their mind. A handy counter-argument to throw back at all those tax-and-spend radicals.
And, the political impact of Edmonds’ misremembered history doesn’t stop there. In the course of the next few months, New Zealanders will hear a great deal about being “over-taxed”. Finance Minister Nicola Willis will argue passionately that the Labour Government’s decision to allow inflation-generated “fiscal drag” to pour unwarranted billions into the state’s coffers stands as a text-book example of over-taxing wage and salary earners. To describe National’s policy of returning the state’s ill-gotten fiscal gains to the ordinary Kiwis from whom they extracted as a policy of “tax cuts”, Willis will insist, is most unfair.
Now, imagine that Edmonds’ caucus colleagues are as clueless about the history of Ancient Rome as the ordinary voter. (It doesn’t require all that much imagination!) In their minds, too, a little voice may commence insisting that what Labour did was wrong.
Grant Robertson, acting with the best of intentions, had connived in their working- and middle-class supporters being over-taxed year after year after year, the little voice will say. So, just as the Emperor Justinian’s over-taxation of Rome’s citizens caused the Empire to crumble, Labour’s reliance on the unfair extractions of “fiscal drag” contributed to the fall of its own electoral regime. If Edmonds’ misremembered history was to take hold of her colleagues’ imaginations in this way, then the Labour Opposition’s whole campaign against National’s tax-cuts could be seriously undercut.
False historical explanations of pivotal events are very far from being inconsequential. Perhaps the most pernicious example of historical disinformation is the Dolchstoßlegende – the entirely false accusation, spread by the reactionary Right, that Germany’s World War I soldiers, far from being defeated by the Allied Powers on the field of battle, were actually “stabbed in the back” by Socialists, Bolsheviks and Jews agitating on the Home Front. This “Big Lie” contributed hugely to the undermining of the Weimar Republic.
If people can be so dangerously misled about the cause of events that happened only a few months earlier; then misleading them about events that happened 1,500 years ago ought to be a doddle!
Then there’s the question of why Edmonds misremembered her ancient history so comprehensively. Could it be that she wants the historical record to show that excessive taxation is politically unsustainable? Is that because she is personally and professionally convinced (as a tax lawyer) that promising to raise taxes is politically unsustainable? Were that the case, then her appointment as Finance Spokesperson, ahead of the considerably more experienced – and fiscally radical – David Parker, could easily be interpreted as a decisive power-play against the Wealth Tax Faction of the Labour Party by Opposition Leader, Chris Hipkins.
To head-off such dangerous speculation, Edmonds should ‘fess-up to her historical mistakes and treat her colleagues to a short corrective lecture on the actual achievements of the Emperor Justinian. She could tell them about his comprehensive reform of the Byzantine tax system. How he both simplified tax collection, and made it vastly more efficient – thereby increasing the flow of gold and silver to Constantinople.
She could point out, also, the parallels between Justinian’s experience and Labour’s. How the so-called “Justinian Plague”, by decimating the Byzantine Empire’s population, played havoc with its finances – just as the Global Covid-19 Pandemic deranged New Zealand’s economy. Or, how the “Blues” and the “Greens”, rival chariot-racing factions in Constantinople’s hippodrome, joined forces in the “Nika Riots” of 532 AD – very nearly costing Justinian his throne.
There was a time when politicians’ self-immersion in History was one of the profession’s most striking characteristics. Hardly surprising, given the enormous advantage a solid working knowledge of history confers upon those with a hankering to make it themselves. Human nature changes much more slowly than human technology. There are very few, if any, political scenarios that are entirely new. As Mark Twain is said to have quipped: “History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
The trick, Ms Edmonds, is to remember the words correctly.
This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 18 March 2024.
8 comments:
The lack of any knowledge of history is usually a sign of someone who doesn't read historic literature at all. Her comments definitely lower my view of her as a front bench MP.
But to pick a fight, your point on "False Historic Explanations" regarding the "Stab in the Back myth" is not supported by the literature. The idea it was a myth is simply to dismiss investigating the arguments, when the fascist talking points that all the leaders of the German Communist Revolution of 1918 (which forced the armistace), when communists were constantly organising strikes and sabotage in war production facilities, the fact that the vast majority of leaders of the marxist revolt were ethnic jews, these talking points of a fascist myth are 20th century propaganda which attempts to deny the talking points without discussing them.
For comparison, it would be comparable to 100 years from now arguing that the myth of the forced covid vaccination caused a political revolt which resulted in a riot in front of parliament. Sure you could sum the events that way, but it completely denies the nuances of context and reflection of what truly happened for an ideological lens simply deceives the people of the future for the delusions of the present.Also people closer to the time likely have far better understanding of the nuances of the situation than later historians.
The self deluding nature of propaganda has come to undermine the legitimacy of academia and trust in its institutions. The Labour party has a legitimacy crisis, where it is now widely despised as the party of covid tyranny by many of its former voters who thought "Stuff this lot". What did the Jacinda regime deliver? GDP was reportedly growing, unemployment was reportedly very low, pay was growing, we were saved from covid and we had this lovely compassionate government in theory. Yet it showed its fags to the kulaks who wouldn't comply with their agendas, whether they are unreconstructed racists who want to not keep up with the current iteration of Treaty theology or to refuse the hobson's choice on a vaccination.
The same disdain has destroyed trust in media which enables governance and coherent narrative setting for the people within New Zealand. If a huge portion of your population simply unplugs from regime media and the regime media simply panders to regime enjoyers, you will find yourself very out of touch. None of these wounds, none of these fractures have healed and no one has taken the steps to rebuild that trust.
I don't think your pal Barbara Edmonds was altogether wrong about the tax thing. Of course, her argument is misleading. Taxation did contribute to the problems the Roman and the subsequent Byzantine Empires experienced during the cataclysmic periods from c400-c700. Not so much a cause for the decline - and that decline was little short of a collapse in the mid 5th century, and, later in the 7th - as a contributory factor - or perhaps should I say, feature.
Yes, Justinian's programme for reconquest clawed back maybe half the Western Empire that had been lost. But contemporary and later commentators remarked many of the large cities in Italy had been depopulated. The effective annihilation of the Vandals in North Africa left a near vacuum, with deleterious long-term effects. This did not stop the Constantinopolitan tax collectors demanding payment in full - including back taxes dating from Ostrogothic overlordship. It was said at the time: 'nothing remained for the inhabitants but to die, since they were bereft of all necessities of life.' Edward Gibbon is as scathing.
What Ms Edmonds has missed was the 'hollowing out' of the Empire, already a problem when the it was at its height. The Eastern Empire came within an ace of total dissolution after Justinian I, saved for a time by Maurice and Heraclius. Impoverished by endless wars with the Persian Empire, its population oppressed still by swingeing taxation, riven by religious differences, the Empire lost the entire North African and Levantine littorals to the Arabs of Islam. The Persian Empire, equally exhausted, vanished altogether. About the same time, Slavic peoples and their Avar overlords were overrunning the depopulated Balkan Peninsula almost as far south as Athens.
That the levels of Byzantine taxation were so burdensome and resented was, together with Islam's religious tolerance and less grasping fiscal demands, enough to ensure that any attempt to restore the lost territories would receive no help from the locals.
Roman/ Byzantine resilience permitted the continued existence, and even successive partial recoveries, from the disasters of the 5th, 7th, 11th and 13th Centuries, but the losses could never fully be made good. Always they could be traced to internal corruption, upward distribution of wealth (and hence the decimation of a large semi-independent rural productive sector), theft of state assets, and, latterly, conferring valuable trade and industry to foreign interests.
Taxation, however crushing and irksome, was the least of it. After all, it must itself have been a consequence, rather than a cause, of the self-inflicted enfeeblement of Empire that occasioned the disasters it had to face. It was lucky to find leaders able to steer the Empire back towards a measure of stability, peace and prosperity. Eventually the Empire had to run out of luck.
(Just an aside, here. If we wish to find a character from history with whom to compare President Vladimir V. Putin, I reckon we need look no further than Alexius I Comnenus).
Cheers,
Ion
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Brilliant, as usual.
Edmonds' cook book may be more sure to rise than her history.
Firstly, tax take was very different than income tax.
"In ancient Rome there was no income tax, instead the primary tax was the portoria. This tax was imposed on goods exiting or entering the city. The size of the tax was based on the value of the item itself. It was higher on luxurious or expensive items, but lower on basic necessities."
Apples and oranges. That in itself makes her comparative model ahistorical and useless. However, you then have to factor in the Plague of Justinian -
"Reports suggest that Constantinople was the hardest hit city during the pandemic, and saw upwards of five thousand deaths per day during the most severe months. There are a multitude of sources with differing estimates for the plague's death toll, with most ranging between 25 and 100 million. Until recently, scholars assumed that the plague killed between one third and 40 percent of the world's population, with populations in infected regions declining by up to 25 percent in early years, and up to 60 percent over two centuries. The plague was felt strongest during the initial outbreak in Constantinople, however it remained in Europe for over two centuries, with the last reported cases in 767. Pre-2019 sources vary in their estimates, with some suggesting that up to half of the world's population died in the pandemic, while others state that it was just a quarter of the Mediterranean or European population; however most of them agree that the death toll was in the tens of millions."
Does she not think between 25-50% of the population dying does not effect the tax take? Productivity was generally agrarian, does she not see a labour shortage?
The most you could say is that she had an economics lecturer who tried to use a counter-factual example to justify economic today. No one can say that Justinian's tax was over-reach because the plague was an economic reset, and lasted almost two hundred years of returning waves. The level of causalities left the expanse of the Empire unable to be defended. If not for the plague, his reconquests may have been consolidated and the military Keynesianism producing wealth - it is impossible to know.
The one lesson that can be taken is than any government should maintain an economy that can adjust to unforeseen emergencies. This is something the market does not and cannot do.
Altogether too harsh on Barbara. People often use historical analogies in discussion and get them only partly right. It was an interview, not a prepared paper.
She clearly has done some historical study, way beyond what most people would do.
I thought she was pretty good in the interview. She is a relatively new MP and this was probably her first major interview.
The fact she understands the limits to taxation is a good thing. She will be well aware of the risk of capital and people flight to Australia.
Let’s see how she performs over the next year.
She has to be seen as a Finance Minister in-waiting, not a "relatively new MP", further, she is aware an election review has to happen, with tax take and policy central. About a week later, Labour announced a tax policy review.
It would seem she has created policy about limiting tax intake without the membership giving direction or considering policy. She justifies with an historical example that is ahistorical, which is intellectually lazy and is an attempt to sound smart while treating the audience (including the membership) as less so.
"From each according to his ability,to each according to his needs"
"There should be no taxation that does not differentiate between rich and poor"
Start tax policy with principles, and develop from there.
Chris - a word of appreciation from an occasional reader, and on rare occasions a commenter - your blog has a thoughtful quality sadly absent from many leftist sites.
Having said that, I have two quibbles. I would not credit Grant Robertson with the best of intentions - ideology combined with incompetence better describes his tenure as finance minister.
And it was not Covid 19 that deranged New Zealand's economy - it was the destructive and entirely unnecessary response to it by the Ardern regime.
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