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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Conspicuous consumption and waste arouses the ire of the lower classes and leads to civil unrest.

Are you sure it's not more simple, less cynical? Perhaps morality of the time and place didn't want people to be conspicuous-consuming assholes, and saw it as the duty of the state to uphold.

Those are two sides of the same coin in my view. Though I'm no expert on Roman history I've read enough about it to see such ebbs and flows.

The idea that "conspicuous" consumption is worse than inconspicuous consumption is necessarily rooted in classism -- it's that you don't want the "lowers" to see what they can't have, and anyways, you're only jockeying for status among the uppers anyways, so why not consume inconspicuously in an uppers-exclusive environment?

Ancient Rome had no shortage of outrageous decadence and constantly struggled with class warfare, slave uprisings and the political necessity of winning the hearts of the "people"

I'm not saying these concerns aren't anywhere in Roman history and politics (that would be naive), but I think in many cases the law can be a reflection or encoding of what a culture puts value on, without that as direct explanation. If there was a cultural outrage, and expectation that the state do something... Then why not?

We spend a lot of time in society today talking about "limited government" and focusing a lot on overreach, many people thinking the state shouldn't legislate morality. I have a hunch the Romans felt less of this.

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