Humble
Living Is A Must
Humble
living is a must for a society to maintain its liberty. It cannot preserve it
through wealth and hoarding. If it becomes too wealthy, or more accurately, too focused on wealth, it will become decadent. This happens again and again in history.
I have
written elsewhere about how important it is to place limits on the land the
wealthy can own. I have even argued that people should be limited to owning
one, maybe two houses, if their work requires it (for example for such a people
who live in one state but must fly to say Canberra for work). Anything else
will inevitably lead to the wealthier people gobbling up all the land (Isa. 5:8-10).
I am sometimes accused of being a socialist because of suggestions like this, simply because
many people are trained to see the world in a binary sense, socialist
collectivism and capitalist individualism; the former being evil and the latter
being wholly good. But this is a false binary, there have been many different
economic systems in history, and many of them, including the Bible’s own system, recognized
the dangers of the wealthy owning too much land and therefore placed limits on what they could own.
The Romans
had a similar system, where, in the early stages of its republic, people could
only own a few acres of land. This seems to have been more from convention,
than an application of the laws which required this (though they did have such
a law, the Agrarian law). But this convention was followed by the Romans so consistently,
that it had the same effect as righteous a law. The effect was that no Roman citizen was
able to become too rich and too powerful, so as to be able gobble up his own citizens
lands and rights.
Machiavelli
notes how this limitation preserved the liberty of the Romans:
“Of the poverty of Cincinnatus, and that of many other Roman
citizens.”
We have argued elsewhere that it is of the greatest advantage
in a republic to have laws that keep her citizens poor. Although there does not
appear to have been any special law to this effect in Rome, (the agrarian law
having met with the greatest opposition,) yet experience shows that even so
late as four hundred years after its foundation there was still great poverty
in Rome. We cannot ascribe this fact to any other cause than that poverty never
was allowed to stand in the way of the achievement of any rank or honor, and
that virtue and merit were sought for under whatever roof they dwelt; it was
this system that made riches naturally less desirable.
We have a manifest proof of this on the occasion when the
Consul Minutius and his army were surrounded by the Equeans, and all Rome was
full of apprehensions lest the army should be lost, so that they resorted to
the creation of a Dictator, their last remedy in times of difficulty. They
appointed L. Quintius Cincinnatus, who at the time was on his little farm,
which he cultivated with his own hands. This circumstance is celebrated by
Titus Livius in the following golden words: "After this let men not listen
to those who prefer riches to everything else in this world, and who think that
there is neither honor nor virtue where wealth does not flow."
Cincinnatus was engaged in ploughing his fields, which did
not exceed four acres, when the messengers of the Senate arrived from Rome to
announce his election to the dictatorship, and to point out to him the imminent
danger of the Roman republic. He immediately put on his toga, gathered an army,
and went to the relief of Minutius; and having crushed and despoiled the enemy,
and freed the Consul and his army, he would not permit them to share the
spoils, saying, "I will not allow you to participate in the spoils of those
to whom you came so near falling a prey." He deprived Minutius of the
consulate, and reduced him to the rank of licutcnant, saying to him, "You
will remain in this grade until you have learned to be Consul."
Cincinnatus had chosen for his master of cavalry L.
Tarquinius whose poverty had obliged him to fight on foot. Let us note here how
Rome honored poverty, (as has been said,) and how four acres of land sufficed
for the support of so good and great a citizen as Cincinnatus. We find also
that poverty was still honored in the times of Marcus Regulus, who when
commanding an army in Africa asked permission of the Roman Senate to return to
look after his farm, which was being spoiled by the laborers in whose charge it
had been left by him.
These instances suggest two reflections: the one, that these
eminent citizens were content to remain in such poverty, and that they were
satisfied merely to win honor by their military achievements, and to leave all
the profits of them to the public treasury; for if they had thought of
enriching themselves by their wars, they would have cared little whether their
fields were being spoiled or not; and the other, as to the magnanimity of these
citizens, who, when placed at the head of an army, rose above all princes
solely by the grandeur of their souls. They regarded neither kings nor
republics; nothing astonished and nothing inspired them with fear. Having
returned to private life, they were frugal, humble, and devoted to the care of
their little properties, obedient to the magistrates, and respectful to their
superiors, so that it seems almost impossible that the same mind should be able
to bear such great changes.
This state of things continued at the time of Paulus
Aemilius, and these were the last bright days of the republic, when a citizen
who had enriched Rome by his triumphs yet remained himself poor. And so much
was this poverty still esteemed at that time, that Paulus, by way of rewarding
some one who had distinguished himself in war, prescntcd his son-in-law with a
silver cup, which was the first piece of this metal that had ever come into his
house.
I might demonstrate here at length that poverty produces
better fruits than riches—that the first has conferred honor upon cities,
countries, and religions, whilst the latter have only served to ruin them—were
it not that this subject has been so often illustrated by other writers.”[i]
The most
striking thing that I observe here, is that Machiavelli calls owning four acres
of land poverty. His definition of poverty appears to be different to our
modern conception. He is arguing that if your citizens are not content to live
humbly, your nation will be ruined.
For
instance, have you tried to buy four acres of land in Australia recently,
anywhere near a major city? You need to be wealthy, incredibly wealth,
especially if it is good land. There was once a time when it was more common in
our society that you could afford such land. But those days are dwindling because
people have been able to gobble up so much land through excess debt, negative gearing and
other methods, and now to buy land you have to pay rich prices, which means you
need to be reasonably rich to have even a small home block, let alone four
acres. This has come about because of our culture of buying up as much land as income will allow. This creates a society where, eventually, fewer and fewer people can
afford to buy land, because those with the most can push prices out of reach of those with the least.
The Roman convention of each man having a little, and no one being allowed to
gobble up all the land, sustained their liberty for decades. And if you observe
what destroyed their liberty, it was the eventual breaking of this convention
and the hoarding of land by the wealthy in the latter stages of the Republic, you see how important such a practice is. It
was this issue of land ownership which the Gracchi sought to address, and why the wealthy crushed
them, and it was their philosophical descendant, Julius Caesar, who refused to
give up his military power so as not to suffer their fate, that destroyed the
liberty of Rome. The gobbling up of land by a few causes many evils for a nation and its people.
So, call me
socialist, call me anti-capitalist, call me whatever you want. But note that
you have been warned, not just by myself, but also by an eminent historian such as Machiavelli on this same issue, who is in turn reflecting on the great Roman historian, Titus Livius's observation. Indeed, Machiavelli notes that many historical
writers have warned of this very issue. If you let the ownership of land get out
of control the ultimate cost is your nation’s liberty, maybe even its existence. Freedom cannot flourish where some have
everything, and everyone else has very little. It’s a reality observed by all
who read the histories of the decline and fall of nations and empires.
Our society
is in late-stage decline of liberty and the early stages of either oligarchy,
hard socialism, tyranny, or a combination of all these things. And this decline was
precipitated by our people's addiction to a financial system that prioritizes wealth
over everything else. And we all know what the Bible calls putting money above
all else: a root of all kinds of evil. Money should be our servant, not our master, we let it be our master and now it is enslaving us all systematically. Jesus warned us about this.
Limiting
what people can own is not socialism. Socialism in its ultimate form is
collectivist ownership, the concept that people together own everything, and how
this works out is that only those in government positions really have any say
over anything. Limiting what people can own is not socialism it is wisdom, and it is advocated by the scriptures, by the historical greats, and is reflected as
practice in the most eminent phases of the greatest societies; even ancient
Rome.
References
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