The land value tax was a nail in the coffin to the decadent Roman empire. People just got up and left their property.
...the decay of trade and industry was not a cause of Rome’s fall. There was a decline in agriculture and land was withdrawn from cultivation, in some cases on a very large scale, sometimes as a direct result of barbarian invasions. However, the chief cause of the agricultural decline was high taxation on the marginal land, driving it out of cultivation. Jones is surely right in saying that taxation was spurred by the huge military budget and was thus ‘indirectly’ the result of the barbarian invasion.
In all of history, the elite have never been more secure. They've never had anything close to the level of surveillance and policing as today. The police today are literally thousands of times more effective at their job than the time of the French Revolution.
No one with a clue is worried about anything "abrupt". Rebellion is literally impossible.
...the decay of trade and industry was not a cause of Rome’s fall. There was a decline in agriculture and land was withdrawn from cultivation, in some cases on a very large scale, sometimes as a direct result of barbarian invasions. However, the chief cause of the agricultural decline was high taxation on the marginal land, driving it out of cultivation. Jones is surely right in saying that taxation was spurred by the huge military budget and was thus ‘indirectly’ the result of the barbarian invasion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_the_fall_of_...
History does not repeat, but it surely does rhyme.