First Gordon Brown removed billions of pounds from our pensions; now he is about to land 20,000 pensioners with vast tax bills by cancelling a perfectly legal ‘equity release’ scheme. Ancient Greeks and Romans would have thought it beyond belief that the main purpose of modern government was to remove money from its own citizens.
Government had two functions in the ancient world: first, to protect its people from attack, whether from external forces (war) or internal forces (law-breaking), and second, to stay in power (because power = status and wealth). For both of these functions it needed money (or its equivalent). The question was: how to raise it? Since neither Greeks nor Romans ran police states (in fact they both put a high value on the concept of citizen liberty), there was no question of bleeding their own people dry. Besides, that was not the way to stay in power. The aim, therefore, was to bleed other people dry, and they did this by conquest. Fighting and winning were good business, especially when the conquered lands were rich in minerals. It has been calculated that, as a result of their expanding empire, Roman revenues quadrupled between 200 bc and 70 bc; and Pompey’s conquests in the east immediately doubled, or even trebled, that amount.
The result of all this was that from 167 bc onwards Romans endured only indirect taxation, e.g., 5 per cent on legacies, duties on goods and (the most controversial) a half per cent sales tax hypothecated for the retirement of soldiers. Athenians levied a tax on property but only when the Assembly agreed it was necessary, e.g., in war. The result was that everything from the Parthenon to (in the Roman world) roads, bread and circuses, pay for state officials and for the army (which kept the show on the road) did not come out of citizens’ pockets.
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