Posted on 02/19/2014 5:31:07 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Incredible legerdemain has been coming out of the Barack Obama policy shops. Taking the cake is the administration’s response to the Congressional Budget Office report showing that Obamacare will reducejobs for lower-earners. Here’s the official spin: unfortunates (as we used to call them), bolstered by health insurance provided by the government, will now be able to enjoy some leisure instead of sticking to the drudgery of menial work.
Under the umbrella of Obamacare, the poorare free to…find themselves.
We might think these justifications of the health-care monstrosity peculiar, but they have a pedigree. The left has been trading on these ideas ever since the industrial revolution got going in the first half of the 19th century.
The principal figure, as always, was Karl Marx. Marx (writing in the 1840s) noticed that what economists would call the “capital-labor ratio” was increasing mightily as the industrial revolution made progress. With every passing year, one unit of output came care more and more of machines than human labor.
Marx figured that in a relatively short while—say, two generations—the capital-labor ratio would have risen so much as to make the necessity of labor dwindle essentially to zero. Capital would be the sole input to production.
As for human beings, they would now be in the enviable position of having everything provided for them—by all that advanced workhorse capital. They could devote their lives entirely to leisure. The only problem in this scenario was the vice of avarice. If people were greedy, they would take more than they needed, even though there was an abundance of stuff for everyone, and ruin everything.
This is why Marx seethed at capitalists. They were the ones responsible for figuring out how to substitute capital for labor in the economy—that blessed process.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
They did this in Rome—People bought votes for power—by giving free food and circuses! It worked in the short run but in the end Rome Fell.
The mob is America;America is the Mob!
Still, the Roman Empire lasted till what? 29 May 1453.
That’s a pretty good run. Of course, a citizen of the Republic wouldn’t have recognized it. Rome itself was no longer a part of the Empire. And like our modern world, it was the Muslims who finally cut it off.
1453 was the date Constantinople fell. It was the capital of the Eastern empire. The Western empire, whose capital was Rome, fell in the fifth century.
But my point was, it was still the Roman empire. Or so they considered themselves.
STill, it’s a quibble. What 70 year period were you considering?
For myself, I think the end of the Roman people coincided with the beginning of the Roman Republic. Like a snake with its head cut off, it continued to writhe for a while.
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