Yep -- anybody who thinks government can control prices should take a look at history. This kind of thinking goes back a long ways.
Wiki has the result: "However, the Edict did not solve the problem, as Diocletian's mass minting of coins of low metallic value continued to increase inflation, and the maximum prices in the Edict were apparently too low. Merchants either stopped producing goods, sold their goods illegally, or used barter. The Edict tended to disrupt trade and commerce, especially among merchants. Sometimes entire towns could no longer afford to produce trade goods. Because the Edict also set limits on wages, those who had fixed salaries (especially soldiers) found that their money was increasingly worthless as the artificial prices did not reflect actual costs."
Ancient Rome had a population of roughly one million people. That's quite a large market for a government to attempt to manipulate back then, especially before any financial system had matured. Now with populations a hundred times the size and economies many times more complex, its interesting how they are still trying.
You sell a loaf of bread for a proscribed price and they come and kill you. I would imagine the arresting, jury, and trial took only a very short amount of time.
There's a human urge to try to micromanage economics. It all looks so simple. You just set the price of bread so that everybody can afford a loaf each day. How much easier could it get? Or if people are poor, just up the minimum wage. Heck, make the minimum wage 100 bucks an hour and we'll all be upper middle-class! All of us! Above average. All it would take would be some smart politicians to write a law.
Somebody once said that voters should have one year of economics before they would be allowed to vote. I'm against that, but the guy had a point: of all the political topics, economics is the most non-intuitive.
Especially if you go beyond the sort of "Economics 101" where everything is supply and demand, and markets always self-regulate and yadda yadda yadda.
Politics can and does have positive effects on markets, too. The internet that we're using to post these messages, was of course created with US taxpayer dollars. As you say, it is complex, and simplistic things like "those silly politicians should just leave it alone and it would be ok", or "Buy American!" are appealing, but wrong.
Yes, "leave it alone" does not work, but we can reason about that: buyers must be assured that sellers have the goods they are selling. contract law must be enforced for trades to happen.
The "fuzzier" the reasoning to put controls in, the more they seem due to failure. That means that emotional arguments, based on "fairness" are out: practical arguments based on things that simply have to exist for an open market to exist are in.
It's complex, but we have clear limits on each end. Total lack of control won't work, but control based on politics or emotional appeal won't work either. The criteria has to be "things that make the market more efficient"
Law enforcement in the ancient world was all local (communication being space-shuttle expensive), and the standard of living was too low to support any kind of expenditure on criminals. So most punishments were fast (flogging), irreversible (exile), or stigmatizing in some way (branding "thief" on the forehead).
Bear in mind too that most of Rome's million inhabitants were originally family farmers who went broke trying to compete with big plantation-farmers under Rome's weird political institutions. Lots of urban unrest, gang violence, riots, and so on. Gruesome public executions were an effective (and maybe even necessary) means of keeping the peace.
Yep -- anybody who thinks government can control prices should take a look at history. This kind of thinking goes back a long ways.
Wiki has the result: "However, the Edict did not solve the problem, as Diocletian's mass minting of coins of low metallic value continued to increase inflation, and the maximum prices in the Edict were apparently too low. Merchants either stopped producing goods, sold their goods illegally, or used barter. The Edict tended to disrupt trade and commerce, especially among merchants. Sometimes entire towns could no longer afford to produce trade goods. Because the Edict also set limits on wages, those who had fixed salaries (especially soldiers) found that their money was increasingly worthless as the artificial prices did not reflect actual costs."
la plus ca change...