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Diocletian's brilliant solution was just to tax people by stealing their vegetables and livestock. It was only thanks to the wife killer and child killer, the good christian emperor Constantine, that the currency was stabilized. He standardized the gold content of the Solidus, which became the preferred gold coin of merchants for the next ~1000 years, until the fall of Byzantium. You could look at the history of Rome and extract all the lessons required about the nature of the State and its rulers, and apply them to modernity.