The Ides of March, A.K.A. March 15, is the 74th day in the ancient Roman calendar. It was a religious holiday involving various rituals and gatherings. The Ides of March was also the traditional day for the settling of debts.

Perhaps the “settling of debts” was why the Roman senators who conspired to murder Julius Caesar chose the Ides of March (44 BC) for his assassination; perhaps it was because the senate would be gathering together that day for one of the ritual observances so it was a convenient venue.

I tend to begin working on my income tax return around the Ides of March since just about all of the tax forms have arrived by then, and I like to make sure I get everything together well before April 15, the Ides of April.

Wait—the Ides of April? Is that even a thing? Encyclopedia Britannica is here to help:

The Romans tracked time much differently than we do now, with months divided into groupings of days counted before certain named days: the Kalends at the beginning of the month, the Ides at the middle, and the Nones between them. In a 31-day month such as March, the Kalends was day 1, with days 2–6 being counted as simply “before the Nones.” The Nones fell on day 7, with days 8–14 “before the Ides” and the 15th as the Ides. Afterward the days were counted as “before the Kalends” of the next month. In shorter months these days were shifted accordingly.

So the Ides of April might be reckoned as the 14th or the 15th, but either way, that date strikes more fear in the hearts of American taxpayers than the Etruscan soothsayer’s warning about March 15 struck in the heart of Julius Caesar.

 

 

Back to the concept of the “settling of debts.” No doubt that the US government views the Ides of April that way—it’s the day we productive people pay the government what we “owe” them, ya know, our fair share.

Julius Caesar once was simply one of the Senate’s equals, then the First among Equals, but then he grasped for more power.

 

 

A few senators cut him down to prevent his ascension to Emperor/God, But the Roman Republic wasn’t saved with that desperate act; it’s only that a new dictator rose up to take the place that Julius Caesar had created for himself. F.A. Hayek wrote on why totalitarianism inevitably allows the worst tyrants to rise to the top, even if the original intent of empowering one man was to be beneficial to society as a whole. Hitler didn’t make the 1920s-1940s German society that way; the government structure that the society clamored for made a shitstain like Hitler possible at that time.

What I am saying is that who was the dictator didn’t really matter; it was that the Roman citizens had allowed things to get to the point to where they accepted an Emperor, a Dictator. They grumbled when taxes went up, and up again, but when they were given bread and circuses they quieted down for the most part. Not worth dying for at that point.

Likewise, we continue to pay the tax on the Ides of April each year. The taxes never decrease, you know. When will the productive class be so sapped of resources that the Elites can no longer take enough from them to give out sufficient bread and circuses to pacify the dependent masses?

When the Pharisees wanted to entrap Jesus of Nazareth – that pesky guy who threatened their political power, even though all of Palestine (the Roman province named for the Philistines who originally lived there) including the Hebrew Pharisees were under the thumb of Rome at the time (33 AD) – they baited him with this question:

 

Is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not? Should we pay or shouldn’t we?

 

Whether Jesus was divine or not, he was wise and wary.

Continuing…

 

But Jesus knew their hypocrisy. “Why are you trying to trap me?” he asked. “Bring me a denarius and let me look at it.” They brought the coin, and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”

“Caesar’s,” they replied.

Then Jesus said to them, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”

And they were amazed at him.

 

Of course, the Caesar he was referring to was not Julius Caesar, who’d been cut down decades earlier; by the time the Pharisees tried to entrap Jesus, “Caesar” was a position, a position with many would-be future occupants vying for their shot at it. The phrase, “A republic, if you can keep it” comes to mind. The United States is on paper a republic but is increasingly governed by presidential directives (“executive orders”) and unelected bureaucrats adding regulations, creating more parasitic jobs for more bureaucrats, etc. One difference in our situation from that of the ancient Romans is that they did not have a vast and expanding dependent class to whom wealth of the productive class was transferred in exchange for their lending the Elites an illusion of legitimacy through voting.

As a result of this government expansion (it’s never a shrinkage), we taxpayers have rendered unto Caesar far more than what is Caesar’s. And despite the proposed spending increase is not about aqueducts, durable roads, the common defense. It’s now about lots of graft for the ruling elite but even worse, it’s to the point that rendering to Caesar activity undermines and runs counter to rendering to God.

And if you don’t believe in God, substitute Ethics, Principles, Morality, your family, the Universe or whatever you stand by, and ask yourself how you can hand over the fruits of your labor to a government that wants to destroy everything you labor for. The IRS reaches into your wallet to fund agencies that violate your rights, your privacy, limit your options, even fund things that you find morally abhorrent.

What can we do? I wish it the solution were as simple as an Ides of March (or April) event. But it wasn’t that simple for Rome and it’s not that simple for us.

Education seems to be the most promising front to slow down the trend and eventually to reverse it. Homeschooling and quality private schooling or charter schools are a great start, but not many can afford it. We also could educate our friends through conversations and debates, although the increasing divisiveness and vitriol of debate makes this nearly impossible and at the very least, stressful.

Perhaps it is too late to stop the trend. The culture has become decadent, the nuclear family has all but disappeared from many communities, and many people who recognize the decline of America have simply withdrawn from the world, myself included.

If you’ve slogged through this editorial this long, I apologize that I don’t have a plan or even an uplifting message. I am going to file my taxes on the Ides of April, just like every year.

I’ll leave you with a final image: the present state of the Roman building, Largo di Torre Argentina, where Julius Caesar met his ignominious end. Infrastructure didn’t last forever back then either, and the conquering tribes who inevitably took advantage of Rome’s decline didn’t share Rome’s architecture and engineering expertise. Nor did they share the values that had made Rome great at its height. But in the end, neither did the Romans.