Government control over the economy
The state had long since owned most quarries, salt deposits, and mines; now it forbade the export of salt, iron, gold, wine, grain, or oil from Italy, and strictly regulated the importation of these articles. It went on to control establishments producing for the army, the bureaucracy, or the court. In munition factories, textile mills, and bakeries the government required a minimum product, bought this at its own price, and made the associations of manufacturers responsible for carrying out orders and specifications. If this procedure proved inadequate, it completely nationalized these factories and manned them with labor bound to the job.
Gradually, under Aurelian and Diocletian, the majority of industrial establishments and guilds in Italy were brought under the control of the corporate state. Butchers, bakers, masons, builders, glass-blowers, ironworkers, engravers, were ruled by detailed governmental regulations. The “various corporations,” says Rostovtzeff, “were more like minor supervisors of their own concerns on behalf of the state than their owners; they were themselves in bondage to the officials of the various departments, and to the commanders of the various military units.” The associations of tradesmen and artisans received various privileges from the government and often exerted pressure upon its policies; in return, they served as organs of national administration, helped to regiment labor, and collected taxes for the state from their membership.
Similar methods of governmental control were extended, in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries, to provincial armament, food, and clothing industries. “In every province,” says Paul-Louis, “special
procuratores superintended industrial activities. In every large town, the state became a powerful employer ... standing head and shoulders above the private industrialists, who were in any case crushed by taxation.”
Who is ... so devoid of human feeling as not to see that immoderate prices are widespread in the markets of our cities, and that the passion for gain is lessened neither by plentiful supplies nor by fruitful years?—so that ... evil men reckon it their loss if abundance comes. There are men whose aim it is to restrain general prosperity ... to seek usurious and ruinous returns. ... Avarice rages throughout the world. ... Wherever our armies are compelled to go for the common safety, profiteers extort prices not merely four or eight times the normal, but beyond any words to describe. Sometimes the soldier must exhaust his salary and his bonus in one purchase, so that the contributions of the whole world to support the armies fall to the abominable profits of thieves.
Such a system could not work without price control. In 301, Diocletian and his colleagues issued an
Edictum de pretiis, dictating maximum legal prices or wages for all important articles or services in the Empire. Its preamble attacks monopolists who, in an “economy of scarcity,” had kept goods from the market to raise prices:
The Edict was, until our time, the most famous example of an attempt to replace economic laws by governmental decrees. Its failure was rapid and complete. Tradesmen concealed their commodities, scarcities became more acute than before, Diocletian himself was accused of conniving at a rise in prices, riots occurred, and the Edict had to be relaxed to restore production and distribution. It was finally revoked by Constantine.
he weakness of this managed economy lay in its administrative cost. The required bureaucracy was so extensive that Lactantius, doubtless with political license, estimated it at half the population. The bureaucrats found their task too great for human integrity, their surveillance too sporadic for the evasive ingenuity of men. To support the bureaucracy, the court, the army, the building program, and the dole, taxation rose to unprecedented peaks of ubiquitous continuity.
https://fee.org/articles/will-durant-on-diocletians-socialism/
