I’ve been wondering this for some time now:
Are we Living the Fall of Rome?
From the substack of Peter St Onge, Ph.D.
I was on financial journalist Charles Payne’s show recently talking about the progressive collapse of the once-great city of New York. Charles brought up parallels with Edward Gibbon’s classic book on the Fall of Rome.
/snip
Zooming out, late Rome is almost a perfect fit for New York. What was once the greatest engine of prosperity in the world, of history-changing innovation, a global center of culture, has now become a crumbling parody of itself.
A two-tier society with obscene wealth at the top fueled largely by parasitic finance. Set against a rapidly growing lower class living in progressive misery and insecurity.
All held up by a fading middle class who are fleeced to hold the whole thing together, paying obscene levels of taxes relative to what they earn and obeying a dizzying series of laws and mandates that only hit them: the rich buy their way out, the poor ignore laws.
What unites them is everybody knows it’s unsustainable….. None of these trillions will realistically be paid back. And sooner or later the suckers who buy that debt will make that bet.
Edward Gibbon was a well-known classicist … As a classicist, he knew the ancient theories of societal decline, including the most prominent, the “Kyklos” of Polybius (200-118 BC).
In that model, societies go through cycles of rise and decline. …
So what drove the decline for Gibbon?
Today historians focus on the symptoms of Rome’s fall, the consequences: The moral decay, the economic decline, the fall in public safety, the multiplying plagues from dysfunctional public services, the hollowed-out military that ultimately invited barbarian invasions.
But we know these well — in fact we’re living through many of them. What’s a lot more interesting is the why. Because that’s how you stop it.
And the answer, again directly from Gibbon, is threefold: end the causes. Specifically, the economic mismanagement, political corruption, and endless foreign wars.
The unending welfare, confiscatory taxes, endless foreign wars, the gutting of our military, over regulation…
The bread and circuses multiplied to distract an angry populace.
Civil unrest multiplied as classes fought over a rapidly shrinking pie.
And, above all, foreign wars were used to refocus the population on an external enemy, to drain the cities of military-age men, and to reach for the occasional glory as Rome conquered yet another far off people at Pyhrric cost in blood and treasury.
Taken together, the empire bankrupted itself. Hollowed out its economy, and used the government and war to squander what was left.
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