Like do our grocery essentials really differ enough to justify that everyone take their own car to a grocery store? Like I thought during the pandemic there should be centralized food deliveries, but in retrospect there should just be centralized food deliveries.
It's always made sense to me. I believe even some societies in the antiquity provided rations of staple foods to their citizens, especially in times of emergency.
centralized granaries and ration distributions existed in most ancient city states.
Also credit-based economies rather than money-based economies existed back then as well. Adam Smith's "Barter Economy" was pure theoretical speculation that has been proven false by archeology and anthropology. Yet every introductory economics course in the West still teaches it like gospel.
:graeber: :palestine-strong:
yep Debt The First 5K Yrs is where i learned it
Rome introduced the grain subsidy in 123 BC, which evolved into a grain dole as the urban poor became a larger population (as they were forced off their farms by slave plantations) and the Senate realized that a food riot could potentially get them all killed.
No no, you see, bread and circuses were a bad thing. The people should have been starved or enslaved into useful labor. This is why Rome fell. Second Century Romans went soft.
Ignore the 200 more years of Rome in the west and the 1000 years of Byzantium.
It just wasn't the same after this, tho
It wasn't the same after a lot of things.