
Subject: Re: Can Washington improve GDP growth? Date: 11/17/2012 3:00 PM
Recommendations: 3
The great innovative genius, Genghis Khan, who created the world's largest and longest-surviving empire up to that time, is said to have insisted on cancelling old laws before making new ones so that there could not be more laws than a man can remember. I think he set the limit at 21 laws. Some of his laws enforced freedoms rather than restricting them, for instance the freedom to travel without being robbed, stopped, or taxed along the way. He was a man who understood economics very well and brought peace and prosperity to his dominions in a way that had not been previously experienced in this world.

The Mongols were a lot of things, but they sure weren't peaceful. I don't know how many laws they had, but the punishment was usually death. For example, not picking something the solider in front of you dropped was a capital offense.

I see that Wikipedia credits the Mongols for killing between 7.5%–17.1% of the world population.


I'm not sure they "brought prosperity" either. A favorite tactic was to force the inhabitants of a region to collect the harvest which the Mongols would keep. The Mongols would then kill all the farmers. That meant there would be no harvest next year, which brought widespread starvation. The Mongols used this tactic extensively in what is now Russia which they conquered in short order. Kiev was one of the largest cities in the world until it was sacked by the Mongols and virtually all the inhabitants were killed or enslaved. It didn't recover for centuries.

You may have heard the "Golden Age of Islam" when the Islamic world, centered in Baghdad, was a fountain of commerce, science and learning:


That ended with the Mongol sack of Baghdad, which at the time was also one of the largest cities in the world. The Mongols destroyed all the irrigation canals (which largely have not be rebuilt to this day), destroyed the libraries, and killed virtually all the male inhabitants and stacked their skulls in a giant pyramid. Baghdad was never again a world center of power, or even much more than a backwater. On the bright side they only had 21 laws.
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