I hear alot of this “Fall of Rome” meme rattling around from the left these days. High taxes, lack of entreprenuerial spirit, moral bankruptcy, a weakened military, a loss of cultural identity- all these define the Democrat party, so they must be experts on the “Fall of Rome”. They are plotting it every day. The antidote to decline is liberty, decentralized government, low taxation, the entrepreneurial spirit, traditional morality and an elite volunteer military. Check, check check check. Sounds like conservatism.
Hear, hear.
May all the doofus bellyaching stop right there.
“so they must be experts on the “Fall of Rome”. They are plotting it every day....”
This hackneyed historical analogy misunderstands Rome’s decline and our problems.
Whenever intellectuals of the author’s ilk start fretting about fiscal solvency it is always being used as a Trojan horse for raising taxes. It is amazing how little the media and permanent washing bureaucracy cared about entitlement reform when Clinton was in office. It was as if this burning problem didn’t exist.
The reality of the situation is that the Social Security System’s problems could be solved with one stoke of the pen. Merely by restricting COLA adjustments to the Social Security system to the inflation rate would fix the system in near perpetuity. This simple change would reverse the current insane policy of computing COLA increases based upon labor force productivity rates. This bit of insanity was enacted in the 1970s.
Similar changes would quickly fix the other entitlement programs.
The only way in which we resemble Rome is in the way in which public officials have been co-opted by special interests I have a solution for that problem but it wouldn’t be pretty.