Some aspects off tax policy and collection never seems to change. I'm preparing my lectures on the fall of the Roman Empire and its replacement with the Germanic kingdoms (often inaccurately called "the Dark Ages"). I knew that Diocletian was responsible for adopting maximum wage laws, and sometime thereafter, many jobs were made hereditary, because workers evaded these maximum wage laws by changing jobs. The textbook we are using also mentions that the tax burden increasingly fell on the lower classes, as the population declined, and the wealthy had themselves exempted. In looking for more detail on Roman tax policy and collection, I found the following quote from Arnold Hugh Martin Jones' The Later Roman Empire, 284-602: A Social Economic and Administrative Survey (1964), 1:457-8:
The technique of the canonicarii of the praetorian prefecture is vividly described by Valentian III. The produced 'alarming demands for numerous different taxes'; they put out 'a smoke screen of minute calculations involved in impenetrable obscurity'; they demanded 'receipts for a long series of past years, receipts which the plain man, confident that he owes nothing, does not think to preserve'.Some things never change.
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