Correspondent: Washington Rulers Resemble Medici Family

By: Times-Dispatch Staff | Times-Dispatch
Published: December 14, 2010

Washington Rulers Resemble Medici Family

Your editorial, "Socialism," noted that passage of national health-care legislation was promptly followed by the Obama administration granting waivers to certain large corporations and labor unions. This pattern brought to mind the history of Florence, Italy, during its centuries of dominance by the Medici family.

The region rapidly ascended to become a self-governing world leader in business, the arts, and diplomacy, and then almost as quickly declined into an impoverished, anarchic backwater. Its rise and fall has uncomfortable parallels to current events.

Without disregarding the general brutality and corruption of the time, the 15th century Medici scions encouraged leaders of their republic to keep taxes as low as possible, limit restrictions on commerce, and focus on improving infrastructure, defense, and order. They encouraged the city's prominent families to contribute and compete in support of scholarship, the arts, and charity as well as the creation of new industries, employment, and wealth. Florence flourished economically and culturally, using its dollars and good sense to maintain its independence from Europe's more militarily powerful nations.

All of this was undone by the Medici grand dukes at the turn of the 18th century. Seeing themselves and their state as one, they increasingly diverted public funds to support families, friends, lifestyles, and tastes. Taxes became more numerous and rates ever higher while infrastructure and industry waned until the populace became dependent on publicly supplied jobs, housing, and food. Economic and social regulation increased. Official monopolies for essential commodities and services were granted, inevitably followed by exemptions for a select few. Both the granting and the waiving temporarily enriched the grand dukes and an ever-shrinking and more isolated political class while feeding corruption, destruction of order, and the public's loss of faith in its rulers and institutions.

Literally and figuratively, Florence's renaissance ended in public and private bankruptcy and impotence.

Thomas Singleton Driscoll.

Richmond.