The Origin of Florence 

Florence is the greatest Renaissance Town. Dante, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and many others all lived here. Italy is a diverse country. After unification of Italy in 1860s, the written language of Florence, the language of Dante, became the official written language of Italy, the spoken language of Florence became the official spoken language of Italy. The paintings of da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael became the international gold standard of art. Today, numerous tourists around the world flock to the Uffizi Museum to admire the greatest art works. Yet, Florence, like many other great places, had a humble origin.

The power of Rome came from Roman soldiers. Roman soldiers were formidable fighting machines because they were rewarded with land, arable land. All arable land are occupied by someone. Roman generals have to expropriate land from some people to redistribute it to their soldiers. Usually they can’t expropriate land around Rome, for Romans around Rome were politically powerful. Land too far away from Rome was not attractive enough for the soldiers, most of whom had family roots around Rome. Florence was a such place. Far enough from Rome, the locals were not politically powerful; close enough from Rome, the land was attractive to the soldiers. 

Virgil, the greatest Roman poet, had written about the sorrow of the peasants whose land had been expropriated. Officially, their land was bought by the generals like Caesar. But they had little say about the price. Even living in the most powerful empire, with the fairest law, the people at the margins were powerless.

I was once puzzled by the brutality of the British enclosure movement and the near universal endorsement of the movement by the intellectuals. There was a short but influential article titled The Tragedy of Commons. Why such a strong wording? Why using the word tragedy? Weren’t the lives of the expropriated and displaced peasants tragic enough? The enclosure movement, by the way, was not a “market response”, alluded by the mainstream media. It was a long series of parliamentary acts responding to the individual petitions by the well connected people to legalize the seizure of common properties.

After the 2008 Great Recession, I had thought, naively, given the excess of the financial elites, there must be enough political will to curb the power of financial interests. The very opposite happened. The continuous quantitative easing engineers the greatest boom of the stock markets in human history. At the same period, the fertility rate of US, higher than two at 2007, drops sharply. The wealth of the ordinary people has been expropriated and diluted greatly. Again, the greatest accumulation of wealth by the ruling class and the decline of lives of the ordinary people in US is not a “market outcome in the age of technology”, as we are told. Rather, it is a result from carefully engineered political, legal and policy decisions. 

Rome, Britain, and US have been the most powerful empires of their own time. Average people in these empires probably live a far better life than the rest of the world. Yet even in these places, regular people have far less political power than they would imagine and they have been told.