Roman Empire
Most know my negative views on what is happening in this country. I thought the following article from 20smoney.com put things into proper perspective.
The point is that we are going through our lives just as usual. Sure, a neighbor or two might be out of work but everything else is the same. No it isn’t! A bell doesn’t suddenly go off signaling that the U.S. has passed its zenith and is on the downside. Nor will you get a warning before your company, municipality or pension fund collapses. Things move glacially, until they don’t. Then they move mercurially.
This article puts this point into perspective.
Is America Just Like The Roman Empire?
27 JULY 2010The similarities between the Roman Empire and America today are fascinating to me. There was a great article recently that discussed this connection and I’d like to comment on some of the points made in it. You can read the article here.
First, the article starts off with an important question:
When do you suppose the citizens of imperial Rome first realized that their way of life had tipped into inexorable decline?
It’s important question because I would submit that we should ask the same thing of us today here in America. For more evidence on WHY we should be asking this question, read the following article entitledhow to tell if you’re in a depression. I would suggest that most Americans are in denial about the direction of America. As I’ve discussed many times, there is a rebalancing that is starting that will be unavoidable. Standard of livings have to decline in America. We’ll do what we can to fight it, but it will be futile.
The author of the source article compares America to Rome in the following way:
A few foresaw the impact of Caesar’s usurpation of the rule of law, marking his ascension as the beginning of the end. Many more sounded the alarm when Rome’s fiscal balance spiraled out of control, debts multiplying faster than the ability to extract taxes from a dwindling base of productive citizens. The plebeian masses, accustomed to bread and circuses, were probably oblivious until Rome was finally sacked. Everything was fine yesterday, how did these barbarians arrive at our gates?
A strange sign of the times has begun traversing America’s rural byways. The sole purpose of this giant machine is to grind up paved roads leaving behind a trail of chopped asphalt and gravel. Strapped county administrators are throwing in the towel, unable to maintain their road systems absent the flow of largess cut off from near bankrupt state and federal agencies. Instead of reducing their carbon footprint by driving ecologically friendly electric cars these people will soon be riding horses. The Sierra Club must be thrilled.
Large parts of Detroit are returning to the wild as abandoned sections of the city succumb to bulldozers. Homes whose purchases were made possible by an unsustainable conflux of bloated union wages, liar’s loan mortgages, and easy Federal money are disappearing faster than Barney Frank can say “roll the dice.”
The response to these signs of decline? Our own aspiring Caesar and his phalanx of facilitators promise more, not less. Free healthcare for all! Free cash for not working! Buy a car, buy a house, get a check! Bottomless subsidies are being shoveled at environmental impresarios promising to save us from invisible gas by covering the land with windmills and algae farms. Court economists scream that things will keep getting worse unless we tax, borrow, and spend our way back to prosperity.
Whether you buy in to the connection here or not, you have to admit, we’re living in very, very interesting times for Americans. A time where economic expansion has clearly peaked a few years ago at the height of the expansion of the credit bubble. Contraction is mandatory, whether its in the form of deleveraging, bulldozing Detroit, or closing of thousands of retail centers & malls. Side note: A mall near me which isn’t the nicest mall, but is by no means a dump, has turned into a disaster. Probably 20% of the stores are vacant, and the shopping mall now has a tattoo parlor and a “We Buy Gold” store — hardly world class tenants. The mall will go under in the near future.
As we mentioned in previous post entitled the US is collapsing, but who cares because Lebron James is going to Miami, arguably the biggest problem is the ignorant masses who have their heads in the sand or are too busy worshiping celebrities. The author agrees, saying:
What will it take to make most people realize that the grand American experiment is tottering on the brink? The destruction of their life savings? The nationalization of vast industries? The high seas teaming with pirates? A humiliating military defeat at the hands of primitives in a far off land?
A society that consumes more than it produces, rewarding the former and punishing the latter, is not sustainable. A society that feels entitled to the good life without understanding where it comes from is delusional, rendering itself incapable of solving problems.
Thoughts?
The current US situation is nothing like the fall of the Roman Empire. Rome continued to prosper and expand for hundreds of years after the end of the Republic. The maximum extent of the Roman Empire came about 140 years after Octavian became the first emperor. The extent remained pretty much the same for another hundred years or so, until plagues, invading tribes, and unwieldiness of governance began to cause a contraction. But it bounced back for a time, until eventually the Empire had to be divided, and then the West fell to the barbarians while the East flourished for a few hundred years until overpowered by invading Muslim hordes.
Your attempt to project your own views of the modern US onto Roman history fails miserably.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Recipes Clipboard, Monty Pelerin. Monty Pelerin said: Blog post: When Did Rome Realize It Was Finished? http://www.economicnoise.com/2010/07/27/when-did-rome-realize-it-was-finished/ [...]
I have seen this coming at least since the 70′s. It has steadily accelerated until 2008 when the fan got hit. The lies and distortions have accelerated also until now we have weekly or even daily disclosures and bolts from the blue about ‘journolists’ and corrupted officials and racists government officials on and on…… the msm seems overwhelmed by trying to distort and cover up, but they are amply aided by ignorant and selfish citizens……….
solutions..?……. I don’t see many or much hope……… it would take a perfect storm of wisdom at this point to save the country and that seems unlikely as many groups pump somali’s and africans and illegal immigrants into our country as fast as they can……… while we look around frantically and ask, “is that racist”?
Few Americans know enough history to be able to draw any parallels with the fall of Rome or the failure of democracy in Athens. Few Americans understand that the American principle of government is that legitimate government is defined in the Declaration of Independence as that government which protects the equal and sovereign individual right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Few understand that the Constitution attempts to limit the federal government to just this purpose by only allowing it to have a few enumerated powers mostly pertaining to dealings with foreign governments and external persons, while retaining all other powers for the states and the People. Few understand that when Teddy Roosevelt said he would do whatever he felt needed to be done provided the Constitution did not explicitly say he could not do it, that he threw the Constitution away because it made no attempt to enumerate all the infinite number of powers a megalomaniac might dream of claiming. Most Presidents since Roosevelt have substantially followed Teddy Roosevelt’s lead and bought into his claim that one need not fear the concentration of power in the hands of one man. As a result, most Presidents have taken on powers they have had no idea how to use wisely for they have hugely underestimated the impossibility of one man understanding the incredibly complex individuality of individual Americans. These Presidents and our Congresses have sought to substitute their judgment for that of every American seeking to realize his own chosen values in voluntary association with others in the free market of ideas, goods, services, and personal relationships with disastrous results. They have made it clear that government is nothing but brutal, ignorant force.
Some Americans are awakening from their government-controlled schools indoctrination in socialist thinking and starting to take an interest in the American principle of government and in American history. Many of these people are in the Tea Party movement. Many are now reading Atlas Shrugged, The Road to Serfdom, Free to Choose, Liberal Fascism, Thomas Sowell’s books and other sources pointing them toward the importance of choosing your own values and being free to live your life in accordance with them while using the free markets to associate voluntarily with others for a multitude of purposes. I hope this reawakening continues until the socialist scourge is obliterated and dares not raise its head again. If that is to become true, then we must wrest control of our schools and colleges from the government which works tirelessly to suppress this knowledge and to promote government-empowering socialism.
I am very happy that I am not the lone voice in the wilderness on this issue!!
West(mostly EU for 20 years) and lately the idiotic congress in usa)
Is oblivious to obvious internal cancer of malice on looni left media enabling congressto destroy rule of law
Its a shame if all is lost
Defence force has only moral and common sense leadership presently
Palin and brewr an a few are havin a TITANIC struggle to get heard in insanity of public discourse