On Laws Limiting Consumption

Journal algebraist's Journal: On Laws Limiting Consumption 4

Journal by algebraist on Friday May 16, 2003 @05:07PM

That it is possible for someone to accumulate enough wealth to the damage the community of which they are a part is actually an old idea. That people don't realize this occurred to me when I was reading Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War during warmups at a gymnastics meet. (How Greek a place to do it.)

A guy noticed the book and asked why I was reading it, and something new I had learned from it. I told him about sumptuary laws. He opined it sounded communist. It is not, of course. It may be socialist, although that is an anachronism, and sumptuary laws were enforced as much by social custom as legislation.

At the time these notions arose in Western history, they weren't called that. The first true sumptuary laws came later, at the time of Greece's invasion by Macedonia. (See Note 1 below.) Well before then, at the time of Solon, one of the first archons, the idea of moderation was promoted as the key to wisdom and happiness. This applied not only to behavior, practices, and policies in individuals, but also to a commonwealth such as a Grecian city-state, like Athens. Much later, Aristotle wrote a good deal about this, regarding wealth and other things. Moderation or the golden mean was the keystone to Aristotle's system of ethics, which coincided with what Greeks liked to believe about themselves.

It is hard to imagine such an attitude about wealth in today's consumer- and consumption-oriented society, let alone justify it. To these ancients, a individual or family could not achieve wealth without the support, protection, and social services, however procured, of the commonwealth in which that individual and family grew. Craftsmen teaching trades and tutors may have been paid out of the family's pocket, but the availability of the tutor in that city-state or region arose in some measure because it was attractive for the tutor to come there. Whatever knowledge and skills the tutor or craftsman had arose because their community collectively created an environment for this to be possible.

Because of this, the degree of wealth held and displayed and how it was used became an important factor in politics and business. Merchants shunned ostentatious folk. As some vaguely specified limit of financial capability was approached, the commonwealth, the public, fellow businessmen, and political leaders had strong expectations about what such wealthy individuals and families should do. Otherwise the up-and-comers were deemed social boors.

For instance, it was expected these people would commission comedies, tragedies, and other public entertainments, free for public viewing. It was expected that these people would participate in helping underwrite public improvements, whether for defense or civil works. This was done in addition to what the treasury of the commonwealth provided. In particular, in case of attack or military campaigns conducted in the commonwealth's interest, it was expected that these individuals paid out-of-pocket for construction and maintenance of ships and wages for their crews. (See Note 2 below.) In short, it was acceptable to flaunt wealth if you will by doing public works but not by giving lavish parties or erecting huge houses.

The idea was that the wealthy had the most to lose if the commonwealth did not do well so they should support its policy beyond what a less well-heeled citizen would. The less wealthy citizen might otherwise decide to remain home because their needs were more immediate.

He doesn't specifically address this as a law, but you can see these values at work in a part of one of Pericle's famous speeches recorded by Thucydides:

I am of opinion that national greatness is more for the advantage of private citizens, than any individual well-being coupled with public humiliation. A man may be personally ever so well off, and yet if his country be ruined he must be ruined with it; whereas a flourishing commonwealth always affords chances of salvation to unfortunate individuals. Since then a state can support the misfortunes of private citizens, while they cannot support hers... .

Moreover, Thucydides himself writes of Pericles, illustrating his character with a tale:

While the Peloponnesians were still mustering at the Isthmus, or on the march before they invaded Attica, Pericles, son of Xanthippus, one of the ten generals of the Athenians, finding that the invasion was to take place, conceived the idea that Archidamus, who happened to be his friend, might possibly pass by his estate without ravaging it. This he might do, either from a personal wish to oblige him, or acting under instructions from Lacedaemon for the purpose of creating a prejudice against him, as had been before attempted in the demand for the expulsion of the accursed family. He accordingly took the precaution of announcing to the Athenians in the assembly that, although Archidamus was his friend, yet this friendship should not extend to the detriment of the state, and that in case the enemy should make his houses and lands an exception to the rest and not pillage them, he at once gave them up to be public property, so that they should not bring him into suspicion.

And Thucydides reports regarding Alcibiades, son of Clinias:

... [T]he position he held among the citizens led him to indulge his tastes beyond what his real means would bear, both in keeping horses and in the rest of his expenditure; and this later on had not a little to do with the ruin of the Athenian state. Alarmed at the greatness of his licence in his own life and habits, and of the ambition which he showed in all things soever that he undertook, the mass of the people set him down as a pretender to the tyranny, and became his enemies; and although publicly his conduct of the war was as good as could be desired, individually, his habits gave offence to every one, and caused them to commit affairs to other hands, and thus before long to ruin the city.

But it isn't as if moderation and sumptuary law were limited to the classical Greeks. The Romans had sumptuary laws, too, at least for a significant time. The Jewish Talmud, interpreting the Five Books of Moses, institutes its own sense of propriety and sumptuary law.

Not surprisingly, many of these notions extended to more modern times, including Scotland and colonial Massachusetts.

The idea of a consumption-based society is a new feature, arising with the collision of the industrial revolution with a vision of the United States as seen through the eyes of its nineteenth century pioneers and expansionists.

Even when Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations criticizes sumptuary laws, he does it because he says they are imposed upon the great public by people of power, wealth, and influence, and they are exempt from them. He is saying sumptuary laws, as known, are hypocritical.

A full-blown revolt against non-capitalist and non-monetary values demands the thoughts and arguments of Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. He writes about it in his essay on Wealth, originally written in 1860 and revised significantly in 1876. It is a true reflection of its times:

Success consists in close appliance to the laws of the world, and, since those laws are intellectual and moral, an intellectual and moral obedience. Political Economy is as good a book wherein to read the life of man, and the ascendency of laws over all private and hostile influences, as any Bible which has come down to us.

Money is representative, and follows the nature and fortunes of the owner. The coin is a delicate meter of civil, social, and moral changes. The farmer is covetous of his dollar, and with reason. It is no waif to him. He knows how many strokes of labor it represents. His bones ache with the day's work that earned it. He knows how much land it represents; -- how much rain, frost, and sunshine. He knows that, in the dollar, he gives you so much discretion and patience so much hoeing, and threshing. Try to lift his dollar; you must lift all that weight. In the city, where money follows the skit of a pen, or a lucky rise in exchange, it comes to be looked on as light. I wish the farmer held it dearer, and would spend it only for real bread; force for force.

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Wealth brings with it its own checks and balances. The basis of political economy is non-interference. The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply. Do not legislate. Meddle, and you snap the sinews with your sumptuary laws. Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and property, and you need not give alms. Open the doors of opportunity to talent and virtue, and they will do themselves justice, and property will not be in bad hands. In a free and just commonwealth, property rushes from the idle and imbecile, to the industrious, brave, and persevering.

Today, using ideas from modern economics and applying modern sensibilities, it is possible to assign the appreciative value of a community to the increase in the price of unimproved land as its surround is developed, schools are built, and public services are added. To our way of thinking, it is already accounted for in that increase of value and, so, does not need to be accounted for again. But that assumes the only reservoir of value is money or its surrogates, and that in itself is unsound economics.

Notes

The incidents which moved the passsage of the first true sumptuary laws were a pattern of increasingly elaborate funerary statues in the Athenian cemetary, some so expensive they bankrupted the families erecting them. Macedon seized control of Greece both because of weakened resources and military skills due to city-state infighting, and because of Macedon's superior military, a professional army which knew how to maneuver rapidly in a fight and to use a superior weapon the tharissa.
Wages were paid both to mercenaries, a rarity at this time, and to people who voluntarily enlisted in the service of the commonwealth, unless they could afford to pay for their own outfitting and helots on their own. Wages were seen as payment in compensation for loss of labor and earnings to the soldier-sailor's family and in place of earnings he could have had if he had not gone to fight.

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