|
Char
|
It was published on September 1, 2001
I'll worry after we've fought our sixth or seventh civil war. Until then, any comparison to the decline of Rome is a stretch.
That's an interesting story about the wild hogs. If I had heard about using corn twenty years ago I wouldn't have wasted so much money taking dates to expensive restaurants.
The enemies of Western Civilization are partnered in spirit with the Islamofascists. Socialists decry what we are and want to see our constitutional form of government with three branches replaced.
Some of the anarchist-socialists are willing to admit that this is their end goal, others get angry and upset that you question their patriotism. They are socialists first and have partnered with the enemies of America on numerous occasions.
Comparisons of America to Rome are baseless. One obvious, major difference between the two is that America is not an empire.
bump
This isn't true. Businessmen in Republican Rome were the social equivalents of trial lawyers today - wealthy buccaneers, sneered at by all the respectable folk.
The city even had mass production of some consumer items and a stock market.
Um, no. There is no surviving evidence of what we would recognize as a Roman "stock market".
Why did Rome decline and fall? The record is abundantly clear on this point.
The record is abundantly clear as to what happened, but nowhere near clear on why. One alternate theory is the Pirenne Thesis, which holds that, despite changes in governmental control, the Mediterranean world was basically okay until the coming of the Arabs in the eighth century, because they destroyed the maritime economy.
Early in the process, a politician named Clodius ran for the office of tribune on a "free wheat for the masses" platform and won.
Clodius? Eventually, yeah, but what about Saturninus or the Gracchi, a generation or two before?
The government responded by imposing penalties for trading in gold, especially for exporting it, much as Franklin Roosevelt did in 1933.
The imperial government banned the exportation of gold because the Roman Empire had a massive trade imbalance with India. Bullion was going east in exchange for luxury goods, and the Mediterranean world was being drained of specie.
Not only did he impose across-the-board wage and price controls in relative peacetime, but he also resigned from office, in the year 305. Nearly 17 centuries later, Richard Nixon would become the first American president to impose peacetime wage and price controls and also our first chief executive to resign from office.
Diocletian didn't "resign" like Nixon did; he retired in order to permit orderly succession under the Tetrarchy. This comparison is facile.
The once-proud Roman army, which had always repelled the barbarians before, now wilted in the face of opposition. Why risk life and limb to defend a corrupt and decaying society?
By 410 AD, the "once-proud Roman army" was itself the band of mercenaries which plundered Rome. National armed forces didn't exist in the sense which we understand them in the fifth century AD.
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can exist only until voters discover that they can vote themselves largeses from the public treasury. From that time on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship."The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back again to bondage."
The history fails to note WHY Rome suddenly went from vibrant trade center to welfare state, though. Julius Caesar is presented in this almost as a holdout; he is, in fact, the great corruptor.
In Rome, soldiers were both the defenders AND police. And because military victories brough bounty, they were also the major source of government income, like the IRS.
In the days of the Republic, landowners were required to do service in the military, and they were the only source of officers. Rome was therefore reluctant to make unnecessary war, while at the same time eager to defend its holdings.
After the Spartacus rebellion, Rome feared it needed more soldiers, and a permanent interior police force. They recognized that servants would not make great officers, and that drafted soldiers would not fight well. So they devised a system to hire soldiers, who would then receive pay in the form of being able to keep their spoils.
Julius Caesar exploited the flaw in this system: Soldiers would be eager to fight wealthy, peaceful neighbors. A group of people living near Switzerland petitionned Caesar to migrate through Roman lands to reach France. Such petitions were often granted; they kept Roman neighbors peaceful and happy. Caesar granted permition, observed as they gathered all their wealth, and then attacked them in the middle of the migration, slaughtering innocent aliens by the tens of thousands. His officers were made obscenely wealthy, and, when they returned to Rome, they bought for him the power he would use to destroy the Republic and make himself Rex Tyrannis over all of Rome.
In a generation, Rome went from being beloved by most peoples of the Earth, including the Jews, to be a hated and oppressive tyranny, as its territories ran red with the blood of conquered and reconquered tributaries.
For a century, Rome expanded. But where it had formerly incorporated peoples into itself, it now just expanded its enemies. Within a century of Julius, Nero would destroy Rome itself.
ping
Michael Grant has a wonderful book that summarizes what seemed to him the most important of these. Gibbon, of course, treated it at much greater depth. Among many were the following:
1. The metropolitan area had grown beyond the ability of domestic agriculture to support it and hence had to depend on lines of communication with North Africa that were threatened by Carthage and broken by the Vandals.
2. The army was no longer native, but first included allied peoples and eventually simple mercenaries.
3. Roman tax bases had shrunk with extensive movement toward the cities and away from agriculture.
4. The native Roman population had fallen below replacement reporduction and was overwhelmed demographically by waves of migratory peoples.
5. The government, in an attempt to support its welfare state, taxed and regulated small businesses out of existence and hence lost the ability to create new wealth from new population.
6. The structure of government was transformed from republican to monarchical, and as such had the problem every monarchy has, stable succession. Each head of state's death threatened, and many inaugurated, a civil war.
7. Communications technology was not up to central administration of an empire that large, hence regional governors became independent powers and claimants to the throne.
8. The rise of Christianity sucked off a major source of administrative ability from state to Church and established an extragovernmental authority that grew increasingly secular as it was forced to fill the power vacuum left by the fall of its parent government. (Gibbon was particularly insistent on this point, much to the chagrin of his own contemporary churchmen).
More, I'm sure, than this brief amateur summary can touch, and so I shall leave that to those on FR who know more about the topic than I. But I will suggest one parallel, and it isn't the U.S. - the factors of welfare state, tax base, hindrance of economy through regulation, inability to field a military, and demographic submersion, apply much more to contemporary Europe than the U.S. And their barbarians are already inside the door.
"In a famous statement, philosopher George Santayana warned that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it."
Okay so, the problem here is that history is written by the victors, so, it's not like history isn't biased, or, something like that.
There's text book history............then there's history.
Ancient history bump.
I beg to disagree with the author...it is not the welfare state that dragged down Rome.
It was the volume of "Civil Servants", their needs and pensions. This is the same problem we are having in the US today. The number of Americans at the taxpayers trough is alarming. If we count all municipal,State and Federal employees the annual totalbudget of wages and pensions surpasses the spending on Medicare and Medicaid.
Ping for later reading. I like the pig catching analogy, and some of the history comments are worth following.
Since I am an Irish German, it is extremely unlikely that I would go the way of Rome. For me to turn into an Italian at my age would be really weird.