Fall Of Rome, Fall Of America

[dairygirl4u2c]

thoughts?

[quote]The Fall of Rome, The Fall of America.

The United States of America is history. Were I a betting man, I’d give us another ten to twenty years, max. And unlike the Roman Republic which took 500 years to implode (followed of course by 500 years give or take of dictatorship), we’ve managed it in less than 300 years: pretty impressive really. I know that many in academia find comparisons between the coming fall of the US and the fall of Rome rather trite, but having studied and taught history and economics for over twenty years, I find their objections---based more upon their elitist intellectualism than upon an honest comparison and evaluation of the two empires---obtuse and reactionary. Even a most cursory glimpse of the dynamics that doomed the Roman Empire to collapse---and that also portent the end of the American experiment---provides us with ample evidence as to the validity of the comparison.

Let’s take a look.

As we know, the Roman Republic was, from its incipience, a Republic ruled by the landed aristocracy. So too was the United States. It took over 200 years before the middle and working classes in Rome---the plebeians---were granted representation through elected officials (tribunes) who actually had certain veto powers in the Roman Senate and who could enact laws in the people’s assemblies. It took the United States less than a century before similar democratic reforms became reality. In Rome, the demands by the under classes that laws existed to curb the power of aristocratic judges found form in the “12 tables” of law. Interestingly, these reforms often came about through peaceful compromise, rather than through violence and coercion, as in its youth the Roman Republic enjoyed a deep and abiding loyalty and commitment to the commonwealth from its citizens. And I would argue that, save for a few significant hiccups along the way, the same can be said of the American Republic.

Between roughly 340 B.C. and 140 B.C., the Roman Republic expanded its wealth and territorial boundaries through a series of successful military campaigns and commercial ventures. Rome conquered Carthage, Macedonia (Greece), Syria and reached its arm of influence even into Egypt. Of course and as you know from studying history, these conquests helped create a class of super-wealthy Roman aristocrats and public officials who benefited from coercively favorable trade agreements with foreign lands, from the acquisition and exploitation of enormous estates and farms, and through the employment of slave labor at a cost far less than that demanded by the Roman citizen-worker. The Republican experiment was beginning to founder on the rocks of greed, wealth and over-indulgence. Hmmmm, sound familiar?

[b]The American experiment with Democratic Republicanism, I would argue, began to decline in the mid to late 19th century when the founding fathers’ ideals of freedom became twisted by a growing class of millionaires; when the Enlightenment-borne ideal of freedom as fair play---a sense of a true commonwealth in which moral and ethical considerations trumped the virtues of unimpeded access to free markets and the accumulation of riches---was supplanted by the belief that personal industry and the unfettered ability of one to amass a fortune through his own hard work became the accepted belief-system of the evolving American experiment.[/b]

[b]I would also add that the profits created by the employment of slave labor in Roman times has been effectively emulated by American plutocrats in their exploitation of, in particular, foreign workers and foreign lands vis-à-vis the actions of such institutions as the IMF and through the creation of an American factory culture in the poorest of poor lands.[/b]

Well, as you know, the Roman virtues of hard work, self-discipline, patriotism, and loyalty to the ideals of the Republic vanished as the rich became richer on the backs of the poor. Small Roman farms were gobbled up by larger estates. Farmers and other members of the growing Roman underclass---unable to pay their debts because they simply couldn’t compete with the free slave labor being employed by the Roman proto-industrialists---moved to the cities, faced mass unemployment, and found themselves in utterly dire straits. Again, it should appear rather obvious that these dynamics are being played out in the current American iteration of the collapse of Rome. While the specific comparisons are clearly not exact replications of the Roman experience, the similarities remain pretty dramatic. American industry cannot compete with overseas production---"American" products made overseas--- that is more cost-effective. Cattle raised in deforested tracts of Brazilian rainforest are cheap, and the slaughterhouses in Brazil are not subject to U.S. workplace regulation. I could site many more examples, but you get the point. The American sense of loyalty and patriotism that was once guided the American identity has atrophied significantly. As the CEOs and CFOs of major industry have grown wealthy beyond the wildest fantasies of avarice, and while the American working class has grown increasingly impoverished, loyalty to the American Republican experiment has waned.

OK, so back to the history books. In response to the growing disparities in Roman society, in response to the ever-increasing socioeconomic desperation of the common Roman citizen, political divisions became increasingly militant and marked by violence and civil strife. Most members of the uber-wealthy aristocracy bitterly opposed any threats to their way of life, and, as you know, most of the Senate by 100 B.C. still remained firmly under the control of these fantastically wealthy kleptocrats. In opposition to these super-rich political leaders, a small but vocal cadre of political leaders who believed in the righteous cause of reform and help for the common Roman citizen emerged on the scene and led the commoners in violent revolts against the aristocracy. The Republican experiment was ending, and the era of dictatorship and Empire was born.

And so here we are, at the dawn of the collapse of the American Republic. And the United States will collapse, and soon. There can be little doubt:

[b]Loyalty to the state has all but vanished as any trust in the system has been summarily destroyed [/b]through the actions of our wealth-obsessed leaders. Do you remember the Star Trek episode in which “the hippies” hijack the Enterprise in an attempt to try and find the mythical planet, Eden? Do you remember that the hippies, led by a brilliant but insane demagogue do, in fact, find Eden. And do you remember that Eden turns out not to be the paradise that the hijackers believed to would be: It turns out, instead, to be a terrible, tragic fraud; a poisonous world veiled by an extraordinary, breath-taking beauty: all of the exotic flora deadly to the touch, the fruits on the trees filled with deadly toxins rather than life-sustaining nectars. Nothing is as it appears. Everything that the crew formerly knew and believed becomes in an instant totally false, poisonous, corrosive. Trust in what once had been accepted as truth is shattered. To survive on the planet Eden is to forget everything you know and to begin anew: trust nothing and no one, lest ye die. And now back to our world. For generations we have accepted as truth that we all need banks, and the loans provided by banks, to survive. We have, with nary a hint of doubt or a moment of protest, accepted as fact that a good credit rating is worth its weight in gold. We have marched toe-to-heel in a parade that has been choreographed by the plutocrats, marshaled by the aristocrats, and coordinated by the bureaucrats. For decades upon decades this has been our only reality, and we have come to trust it just as we trust that the apple into which we bite will be sweet and nourishing. But now, 2008, and in an instant, we have found our own Eden. The banks to which we once flocked, in which we placed out trust and our futures, that once appeared the pictures of health and good-living, have turned inside-out. We no longer recognize what we once did because the rotten underbelly has been exposed, the fetid intestines strewn on the floor at our feet. The smile of the carefully groomed bank manager, once trusted as benignly sincere, is now viewed with hostile contempt. He has become a thief, a toxin, a heartless zombie in an Armani suit. We look at advertisements for credit ratings and we laugh and shake our heads, for we have come to realize that it is all a dance of death, a dance in which the ones who invariably end up dead first are the very ones who worshipped the false god of credit with the most fervent zeal. A report from Amazon.com of quarterly profits is greeted with knowing disdain: the short-sellers are out in force, trying to make one more buck before the truth comes out. The banks and the FED refuse to tell us what we already know. And hiding the truth from us only cements for us the fact that there is, in fact, no truth. Nothing is at it was. Nothing remains familiar. The entire landscape rots under a mist of contempt and lies and fraud and mistrust and disbelief. There is no solid ground upon which to stand. A rotten piece of meat cannot be reconstituted: it must be left to fester and vanish in a haze of maggots and bottom-feeding. Our global economic house of fraud has finally imploded. No one can be trusted. Our government is complicit in this hijacking. Our bankers, our mortgage agents, our investment managers, all part of the epic web of deceit that has brought us to our knees. After all of these years we have at last found Eden, and, of course, it has destroyed us. The United States of America will soon collapse under the weight of this treachery.
[b]
The myth of unlimited GDP growth has been exposed as pure fraud. The last decade of growth in the U.S. has been exposed as nothing other than a growth of debt[/b]---or more appropriately as a multi-trillion dollar tax burden that future generations of common Americans will have to service so that the rich can keep their mansions and yachts and skiing trips to the Alps---and all the while the wealthy have used the promise of growing national poverty to fund their extravagances. They have borrowed and bet and taken trillions in fictitious winnings from the casino, and they have used these false monies as collateral to fund their billion-dollar lifestyles, and they have left the rest of us to clean up after their Dionysian orgy of greed. In Rome, the same. In ancient Rome the heavy tax burden levied on the common citizen by the wealthy, as a way to further subsidize the grandiose lifestyles of the aristocracy, bred an army of militant citizens who took to the streets in rebellion.

The wars of our leaders---Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Iran (?), Pakistan (?)---have been exposed as colonial ventures meant to feed the avarice of the American aristocracy rather than as just battles of our past that were viewed as righteous struggles in defense of liberty. In Rome, the wars of the Empire were increasingly fought by soldiers who fought for money and to try and escape the clutches of debt-servitude and poverty, not because they believed in the “country” for which they often made the supreme sacrifice. Today’s American wars are fought for oil, for increasing the IMF’s global influence vis-à-vis usury and resource exploitation, for increased access to raw materials---not for freedom and democracy as our transparently disingenuous leaders so gratuitously assert. And more and more, the courageous women and men who fight in these duplicitous wars do so not out of a deep and abiding loyalty to the leaders of our nation, but because they are poor and needed a way out. And by the thousands they are returning from war without legs, and without arms, and with terrible brain injuries, and the wealthy have no use for them anymore and as such their benefits are cut and their homes repossessed and they are cast aside.

The fall has been precipitous, and it is impossible to predict how it will play out. Catastrophic climate change, wars between nuclear superpowers, other new wars (Did you read about Israel and Gaza today?), Peak Oil. All of these variables and a thousand others make accurate predictions of how exactly the end of things will arrive is difficult. What is not, however, is this: the end of things is near. Five years, ten years, hard to say: but the American Republican experiment has been slaughtered on the alter of avarice---just as the Roman experiment was. The results will be cataclysmic. Of this there can be no doubt.[/quote]

Edited March 9, 2009 by dairygirl4u2c

[dairygirl4u2c]

[quote]In Vermont some farmers carve mazes into their fields of maze. It's fun, if a not a tad anxiety provoking if you enter the maze at dusk, to try and find your way to the other side. I've always wanted to create a maze that people enter, and then once they've started to try and find the exit---which doesn't exist---then I close the entrance and make it look like just another wall. OK, I haven't really wanted to do this, but the image is useful. It is useful because that is where we stand with regard to saving our economy. The Obama Administration, the Congress, et al are all standing together in the middle of a maze from which there is no exit. Let's walk with them, shall we, as our leaders seek to get our country out of the maze:

So, our leaders begin the journey by voting to spend trillions on economic stimuli. And they feel like they're making good progress. The markets are responding favorably, and morale is higher, and unemployment numbers level off a bit. And our leaders are feeling confident that they are, in fact, moving toward the exit and back into the sunlight. But several dead ends follow.

The first dead end that they hit is when it becomes clear that they have either underestimated, or denied, the amount of debt housed secretly in the vaults of all of the banks and other financials in the country. Tens of trillions of dollars "worth" of garbage hidden away from the light of day and from the scrutiny of the public. And lots of the stimulus funds, despite legislative directives to the contrary, are being used by whomever can get their hands on some of the cash to pay off creditors who are knocking on the door. And other monies are being "sat" upon by the thousands of stimuli recipients just in case they are unexpectedly exposed to some unknown counterparty risk. Remember, much of the toxicity in the system is impossible to trace because it is hidden within securitized bundles of like-valuated---translation: Worthless---assets. And if Citi and BofA are any indication, we're talking astronomical numbers.

Our heroes try another route, that of loosening the credit markets by guaranteeing that they will buy any bad assets from the banks and other institutions that hold them. Then the banks will start extending credit again and the citizens of the country will start purchasing things again, and the GDP will grow. But quickly it becomes clear that this is another dead end: growth in debt-spending only creates a bigger bubble, exacerbating an already catastrophic debt-borne crisis. And [quote]the fact that no REAL production is taking place in the U.S. means that no REAL growth is taking place. Hmmmm. "Let's get our businesses to all produce things HERE, in the good ole US of A!! Then we'll have REAL growth!" Our leaders cheer, and off they go down another path in the maze.

And wouldn't ya know it, another dead end stops them in their tracks. This time it's the major corporations who refuse to move their bases of production BACK to the United States from overseas.[/quote]You see, most of the major corporations in the world maximize their potential profits by setting up shop in South America and Asia and Africa. That way they don't have to pay such high wages and cover health care costs demanded by selfish American employees. WELL, to their credit, our fearless leaders saw this dead end coming, and as such they added language to the stimulus plan that DEMANDED that American workers be put to work producing stuff and that corporations NOT pay foreign workers a penny!

Uh Oh! This move on the part of our adventurers leads to another dead end! The new dead end comes in the form of China and Japan and India not only refusing to buy any more American debt, but even more disastrously these nations have the audacity to actually liquidate their U.S. treasuries, en masse. They're asking for their money back! Hmmmm, that's a big problem. That could lead to the penultimate dead end: sovereign default. Also, this dead end could compel foreign nations to embargo American goods. Well that sure would be counter productive.

Well our team of a-MAZE-ing (sorry) leaders finds yet another route that they are confident will get them out of this beaver dam maze, and for good! They call their pal Ben on the phone and tell him to print trillions upon trillions of dollars so that they can create liquidity and thus ease the crisis and find their way out of the maze. Ooooops. You guessed it: another dead end. Printing tons of money doesn't engender great confidence or trust in the United States dollar, and countries holding our debt consider calling in their chips once again. Also, because the DEBT problem is so much worse than our leaders would ever have admitted---based primarily upon tens of trillions of dollars in derivatives and CDS-based debt festering in the vaults and on the hard drives throughout the financial world---all of this money being printed actually does nothing to make the system liquid. In fact, it does the opposite! The veolcity of money continues to tank as everyone sits on their cash, waiting for the derivatives bomb to go off. Combine this lack of liquidity with an explosion of the money supply, and somewhere well down the road we have the possibility of a hyper-inflationary episode that precipitates a bloody revolution in the steets.

So many dead ends. Our trusted leaders sit down in the middle of the maze and consider their---ummm, our---plight. And in a brief moment of clarity, they realize that there is, in fact, no exit from the maze. Every route seems to end in failure. And then, as if compelled by some unknown force, all of our leaders look up to the heavens, and as crazy as it sounds, god actually speaks to them!! (Imgaine the god from Monty Python and the Holy Grail) "Barack!" bellows the almighty. "Yes, my lord" "Barack, and Barney, and Nancy, and Henry and Alan and Tim (not Tim the Enchanter, Tim Geithner), and all of you in Congress, there is a way out of this hellish maze: a maze that you have created, my children, but from which I am willing to free you." And our leaders promise the almighty that they will do anything---ANYTHING they say---to get out of the maze. And god speaks:

"Make all of the banks open their vaults. Go over their books with the finest of fine-toothed combs. No longer allow financial institutions to mark-to-model or mark-to-bologna any of their assets. [b]Enforce reserve requirements [/b]of 10:1. Sanction any institution exceeding such reserve ratios. Outlaw trading in derivatives. Outlaw short-selling. Let those institutions that are [b]no longer going concerns [/b]fail. Let the insolvent go bankrupt. Take care of the people during these difficult times, but do not save the system that put them in this predicament. Learn how to live without 5% growth. Learn how to sustain. Be stewards for sanity, not avarice. In this way the exit from the labyrinth will open to you. What sayeth you, my children?"

And all of the leaders looked at one-another aghast, and they stood up, and off they went, still searching for their own way out of the maze.

The end.[/quote]

Edited March 9, 2009 by dairygirl4u2c

[dairygirl4u2c]

his mentino of the "myth of perpetually rising GDP" was almost enlightening.
i say almost, cause i just had that realization a few weeks ago for the first time, at least per the stock market and how it can't go up forever along similar reasoning as his.
there's only so much money, it can't go up forever. inflationary money doesn't really count for soemthing of substance, it's more a way to get it up artificially so that it falls eventually, or at any rate, a way for people making money there to take higher shares of the money supply and leave the public with proportionally less than they deserve.
it would spur business, though, so maybe it's not so bad, not sure. there's a lot of counter balancing policies here.

Edited March 9, 2009 by dairygirl4u2c

[dairygirl4u2c]

i blame repubs and dems equally on the housing bubble and crissis. dems were all to happy to get rid of regulations preventing subprime lending and for fanny mac, and repubs are always happy to deregulate. fanny mac etc only constituted a small portion of the increase thiough, it was mostly the greed of the private sector that got things out of hand, but again aided by a lack of common sense regultion. both parties are to blame also for not regulationg or doing something when they saw things getting out of control.

americans are being raped by national debt servitude -- i blame without a doubt the neocons who say 'borrow and spend'. then, i blame the other republicans generally, given reagan and bush II are the ones who are responsible for like 90% of the debt, whatever their reasons. i blame democrats last cause they spend too much, at least they pay their debts as is an elementary principle of finances. it's a game as to who's more responsible per dems and reupbs generally, in a sense, given dems wanted to spend, but without a doubt, neocons are the worst.
even as ron paul says, 'borrow and spend' is much worse than 'tax and spend'.

i blame all government generally for its solution to the debt, being to print money. it shows a lack of leadership. secondarily, i blame repubs, and then the order i described above, cause it goes back to why we have the debt in the first place.

i blame laissez faire repubs mostly for the 'race to the bottom' (see wikipedia) that's occurrig. they're willing ot cut our regulations and allow trade with people who give their workers beans, thereby reducing our pay. keep trade with those nations only as a way to get their resources, and in limited ways that help them out of their poverty in ways that doesn't involve causing us to compete with people who take beans. and those who advocate no minimum wage = an eventuality that we might get paid beans, too.

enviro degradation, i blame mostly repubs. the economy will work in the confines we set upon it-- it's not an either or situation, people or the enviroment, most of the time. but, enviro saving when it's not warranted i blame dems. this could go either way, mostly. i see more pillaging of environment than i see overzeolous saving of the evironment though. most people are not whacky environmentalists, if there's an overabuncance of perspective on this that's wrong, it's with those who say 'to hell with the environment'. this all leads to global warming, and dying ocean, rain forets etc that are disappearing, etc.

also, laissez faire repubs are not allowing any gov intervention in alternative fuels. but, both parties are at fault for being bad at policy making. at least some repubs recongize that that's usuallyu the case and act accordingly. this would save the eivnorment some, and help the economy, tons.

just some rants.

Edited March 9, 2009 by dairygirl4u2c

[dairygirl4u2c]

[quote]In Rome, the same. In ancient Rome the heavy tax burden levied on the common citizen by the wealthy, as a way to further subsidize the grandiose lifestyles of the aristocracy, bred an army of militant citizens who took to the streets in rebellion.[/quote]

i should have bolded this part.
it's important, cause the debt servitude being foisted upon future generations deserves rebellion, and because there's been more and more talk by some that there should be. it's mostly hard core conservatives that i can tihnk of now, but eventually, and i thikn rightly, if it continues, the mroe common person will be ready for revolution

[LouisvilleFan]

Maybe the only argument needed is this one...

[quote]I could site many more examples..."[/quote]

Maybe he should try to cite some examples.

This is just silly. Dairygirl, you gotta come up with something better than this. For example, this statement:

"As the CEOs and CFOs of major industry have grown wealthy beyond the wildest fantasies of avarice, and while the American working class has grown increasingly impoverished, loyalty to the American Republican experiment has waned."

Executives are "wealthy beyond the wildest fantasies of avarice"? I know where the CEO of my Fortune 500 company lives and while he's obviously very wealthy, he is definitely not [i]that[/i] wealthy. Few people live a lifestyle that could be described in those terms. We see them on TV a lot, but compared to the vast numbers of regular folk (even rich regular folk), they are a small group.

Meanwhile, our working class is anything but impoverished. We have Americans in poverty who are impoverished, but they aren't even in the working class since that's usually referring to middle class incomes. All Americans are crazy wealthy compared to most of the world and even the wildest fantasies of our grandparents' generation. [url="http://www.phatmass.com/phorum/index.php?showtopic=91362"]New York to LA in five hours??? That's crazy! [/url]

[quote]Loyalty to the state has all but vanished[/quote]

Get to a baseball game before gametime... or any sporting event, for that matter, but baseball is responsible for the tradition of showing loyalty to our state and everything for which she stands that makes it possible for us to enjoy ourselves on a summer afternoon.

As for taxes, ours remain cheap compared to Europe and other more socialist countries. As for wars, we have a long history of fighting wars for little virtuous reason. Look at how we've forced Native Americans out of one reservation after another, how we treated Japanese Americans during WWII, and our history with slavery. We've got a long and storied history with all forms of sin... that story is older than America or Rome.

The real question that would be more interesting to look into is this: What different did it make to the average family workin' their fields to scratch out a living in rural Italy or Spain or Greece at the time Rome fell? Were they even aware of this event that, to us, seems so monumental in history?

Edited March 9, 2009 by LouisvilleFan

[Lil Red]

+J.M.J.+
plus it's not very nice not to give a link to the piece you are quoting liberally from.

[dairygirl4u2c]

well, i don't believe that america is gonig to be falling any time soon.
i just wanted input.
he's got some good points, and there's some correltations there.

he should have talked more about the national debt, and the true value of our assets. things like the fact the debt increases at two million dollars a minute since the 1980s. like a fifth of everyone a given person pays in taxes, goes to interest on the debt, basically nothing. eg, ya pay 10k in taxes, then ya pay 2k for nothing. not exactly beans.
or, that the US is obligated to pay 50 trillion in its promises right now. social security, medicaid etc, national debt, etc.
not enough to make the it all fall, but it's getting up there.

i've heard the USA's assets in total valued at 120 trillion. if this was based on inflated numbers, maybe it's less. perhaps our liabilities are exceeding our assets.
i've heard the GDP valued at 2 trillion, but that's not meaured in real growth, so it's probably a lot less.

i don't think we'll fall, at this point. but at this point if nothing changes, we;ll be a nation of debt servants, getting more and more to a point of slavery.

Edited March 9, 2009 by dairygirl4u2c

[dairygirl4u2c]

it'd be interesting to see how much percentage wise they paid in taxes in rome, or during king george's rein. ie, both are times when they taxed too much, leading to reblliion etc.

of course, a percentage of 30 back then probbaly meant a lot more then than now, given it was more essential stuff being taken back then. but.

i woldn't be surprised if it's close to the same amount, if not hjigher now.

Edited March 9, 2009 by dairygirl4u2c

[LouisvilleFan]

[quote name='dairygirl4u2c' post='1801116' date='Mar 9 2009, 03:21 AM']i blame repubs and dems equally on the housing bubble and crissis. dems were all to happy to get rid of regulations preventing subprime lending and for fanny mac, and repubs are always happy to deregulate.[/quote]

Long as we can find anyone to blame but ourselves, right? It couldn't possibly be our insatiable appetite for more things, for constantly desiring and living beyond or means, for refusing a simple lifestyle to which [i]all Christians[/i] are commanded to live. Let's blame politicians, institutions, and economic systems... because we all know Ronald McDonald is the real reason heart disease kills so many Americans.

[quote name='dairygirl4u2c' post='1801374' date='Mar 9 2009, 02:41 PM']it'd be interesting to see how much percentage wise they paid in taxes in rome, or during king george's rein. ie, both are times when they taxed too much, leading to reblliion etc.[/quote]

Those times aren't easily comparable to our own. We live in very different societies and economies with different governments and expectations from those governments. Today's economies are far more complex and our lifestyles are more advanced and technology-driven. The bottom line is, if we as a society live sinful/selfish lifestyles, we will eventually eat the bitter fruit of our sin.

[CatherineM]

Romans didn't have to pay as much tax because their economy had a large slave component. They collected plenty of taxes from countries/civilizations they conquered. If we could figure out some way to levy taxes on Guatemala, then we might be all set.

[dairygirl4u2c]

i like what louiseville said. but, with that said... it's because of the selfish demand for things that causes us to fall. we exploit the working classes wrongly in the process, evne in ways that the government should help curb. if the government did curb these things, instead of people complaining about taxes or this that or the other thing... we'd be in a better situation.
i mean, sure theres a lot of truth that we should cut spending a lot... but it doesn't mean we can't increase taxes or take accountabilites on our obligation to 'the people'.
im not meaning ot get this all tied to a political argument-- but it could very well be tied to it. and i think it is rightly so to a significant extent, whoever is right politically. and im next to posititve it's mostly the greed andor ignorance of republicans mostly at this point in the country that's causing the problems. (it's not always been their fault etc
it's safe to say in any cas, that these arguments can be tied to the government and not just our own prolems and sins and vices, though.

[dairygirl4u2c]

it sounds like the roman society was a laissez faire society, though, which just goes to show that that system wuldn't work either. we have marks of oth capitalism and socialistic ideas. our problem right now is our det, our way of getting out of our problms, moslty government debt that i'm talking about.
ron paul once classically couldnt think of a purer capitalistic country that 'worked'. that's prob cause it doesn't exist. and now that i thin aout the roman society... it just shows that it'd fail.
if you starve people, or keep them down, they will revolt.
then again, the government does ensure people have food stamps, a basic. and the cheap housing etc if ya find it, or mayb eshare your food stamps for rent (two hundred bucks if ya got nothin, unless you're in jail), there's ways to get by. some say this is all about keeping the masses passions in check, so instead of revolt, they stay in apathy of all that they can't do about it. perhaps the american capialism will throw the bones that the roman empire either couldn't or wouldn't do.
in that case, we'll be drowned by our political inabilites to come a a sensible solution together, and drown in our debt and other problems.

[dairygirl4u2c]

[quote]Meanwhile, our working class is anything but impoverished. We have Americans in poverty who are impoverished, but they aren't even in the working class since that's usually referring to middle class incomes. All Americans are crazy wealthy compared to most of the world and even the wildest fantasies of our grandparents' generation. New York to LA in five hours??? That's crazy! [/quote]

wealthy things and goods doesn't indicate that we are healthy as a system. it means wwe've discovered technology. if people are deprived... they will revolt. that's why it's like ther'es two americas, wealthy or at least well off or good, and poor. the real arguments you migt have are that we give the poor etc food stamps. without that, our fate would be like rome's. the wealth point is very weak in and of itself. im sure rome could be said to e wealty too.

[dairygirl4u2c]

[quote]Get to a baseball game before gametime... or any sporting event, for that matter, but baseball is responsible for the tradition of showing loyalty to our state and everything for which she stands that makes it possible for us to enjoy ourselves on a summer afternoon.

As for taxes, ours remain cheap compared to Europe and other more socialist countries. As for wars, we have a long history of fighting wars for little virtuous reason. Look at how we've forced Native Americans out of one reservation after another, how we treated Japanese Americans during WWII, and our history with slavery. We've got a long and storied history with all forms of sin... that story is older than America or Rome.

The real question that would be more interesting to look into is this: What different did it make to the average family workin' their fields to scratch out a living in rural Italy or Spain or Greece at the time Rome fell? Were they even aware of this event that, to us, seems so monumental in history? [/quote]

americans have a knee jerk patriotism. it's fair to not say any political party is not patriotic or a problem etc. but, beyond their knee jerk patriotism, both sides get heated about taxes, a lot. when it comes to solving problems they don't.
they only solution we have, is to throw the food stamps at the most poorest. when push camme to shove, whoever is at fault, a civil war or rebellion isn't unlikely at al, no matter of 'patriotism'. im sure the wealthy and ignorant in rome had base patriotisms too.

yes our taxes are cheap. and we're running our country into hte ground with debt. it's mostly the repulican prolem here, without goinngi into it. and so we run ourselves into the ground, refuse to increase taxes a little more while it's obvious we're doing things similar to europe even if not to the same degree. that means we should increase taxes some, it only makes sense. maye not now, and sur we can cut some spending... but the numers show we need solutions.

and so maybe i'm being somewhat inconsistent... cause we do have solutions to our prolems. but, if we don't address them, if we take a laissez faire approach, etc.... we run into the ground.