Posted on 07/30/2009 7:00:18 AM PDT by iThinkBig
"The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight."
Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
After ruling much of the known world for centuries, Rome fell due to a number of factors that, historians believe, would not have been fatal in isolation, but that proved terminal in combination. Military overspending and overreach, an untenable economic system, and currency debasement all played a role. As has been well documented, the Roman emperors attempted to distract the populace from the increasingly dire reality of their situation by providing bread and circuses. But entertainments could not stop the nation-state from yielding to the pressure of its own weight.
There are numerous parallels between the end of the Roman Empire and the path the 226-year-old American republic is now on. One difference in these fast-moving times is that empires can rise more rapidly, but are also likely to decline more rapidly.
(Excerpt) Read more at ragingdebate.com ...
Term limits aren’t the problem. Get rid of the 16th and 17th Amendments, and return ‘power’ back to the States. States have no say anymore :(
http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.com/
Today, courts and commentators generally agree that early efforts to strictly limit the federal government to only expressly enumerated powers were decisively rebuffed by Chief Justice John Marshall in McCulloch v. Maryland.
According to Marshall, the fact that the Framers departed from the language of the Articles of Confederation and omitted the term “expressly” suggested that they intended Congress to have a broad array of implied as well as expressly delegated powers.
As Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story later wrote, any attempt to read the Tenth Amendment as calling for strict construction of federal power was simply an attempt to insert “expressly” into the text. Today, Marshall’s point regarding the significance of this omitted term is probably one of the least controversial claims about the original understanding of Tenth Amendment as currently exists in legal commentary.
It is also almost certainly wrong.
James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, early Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase and numerous other members of the Founding generation regularly inserted into their description of federal power the very word that Marshall insisted had been intentionally left out. According to these Founders, Congress had only expressly delegated power.
Upon investigation, it turns out that this rephrasing of the Tenth Amendment actually reflects the original understanding of the text and its underlying principle. Completely missed by generations of Tenth Amendment scholars, the addition of the phrase “or to the people” to the Tenth Amendment ensured that the Clause would be read as a declaration of popular sovereignty.
According to this theory of government, the sovereign people were presumed to retain all powers not expressly delegated away. Repeatedly stressed by advocates of the Constitution as representing the proper construction of federal power, the principle of “expressly delegated powers” meant that Congress could utilize no other means except those necessarily or clearly incident to its enumerated responsibilities.
Consistently read in combination with the Ninth Amendment’s declaration of the retained rights of the people, the Tenth Amendment was broadly understood to establish a rule of strict construction of federal power - the very interpretive principle rejected by John Marshall in McCulloch v. Maryland.
The Chinese have believed this for decades.
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within.
An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known, and he carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very hall of government itself.
For the traitor appears no traitor.
He speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in hearts of men.He rots the soul of a nation.
He works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city. He infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared.
Cicero
The U.S. adds one international migrant (net) every 36 seconds. Immigrants account for one in 8 U.S. residents, the highest level in more than 80 years. In 1970 it was one in 21; in 1980 it was one in 16; and in 1990 it was one in 13. In a decade, it will be one in 7, the highest it has been in our history. And by 2050, one in 5 residents of the U.S. will be foreign-born. Currently, 1.6 million legal and illegal immigrants settle in the country each year; 350,000 immigrants leave each year, resulting in net immigration of 1.25 million. Since 1970, the U.S. population has increased from 203 million to 306 million, i.e., over 100 million. In the next 40 years, the population will increase by 135 million. Three-quarters of the increase in our population since 1970 and the projected increase will be the result of immigration. The U.S., the world’s third most populous nation, has the highest annual rate of population growth of any developed country in the world, i.e., 0.975% (2009 estimate), principally due to immigration.
“....distract the populace from the increasingly dire reality of their situation by providing bread and circuses”
Is “cash for clunkers” an example of this?
What “American Empire”?
“Empire” my little brown eye!
The author fails to mention the impact of mass immigration and the importation of poverty in a welfare state.
Agreed. In addition to the effect of all this “multiculturalism” over the last 40-50 years. As we become a country that has less and less in common. How could it not fall apart?
History repeats
The answer to the question posed at the end of the video is rooted in the answer to this question: Where would the early church have been if they had put their faith in Rome?
Countries come and go. The US is not, and never was, my savior. Jesus is.
“In spring of 2008 I started calling WAMU a dead bank walking. In Spring of 2009 I started calling the US a dead country walking.” - Robroy.
So much for the "European model" today's liberals admire!
The Roman Empire’s economy was based on the plunder of conquered territories. As the empire expanded, it installed remote military garrisons to maintain control and increasingly relied on Germanic mercenaries to man those garrisons.
I hardly know where to start on the idiocy and ahistoricity of this comment.
The plunder of conquered territories as a basis for the economy occurred primarily, although not exclusively, under the Republic rather than the Empire.
The last major conquest of the Empire was Dacia, in about 110. The (Western) Empire lasted a good 350 years longer. So what was its economy based on during this rather lengthy period without foreign conquest?
The bit about Germanic mercenaries is indeed accurate, but was pursued successfully for centuries, as foreigners were assimilated. It was only when the emperors began taking the shortcut of hiring German armies rather than German soldiers for the Roman armies that things got out of hand.
In short, the author takes one factor from the early years of the empire (pre 100 for the most part) and combines it with another from the end of the empire, ignoring the 300 years in between as is they didn't exist.
Halelujah Brother, I am a citizen of the Kingdom of God, I happen to live in the United States. Should there be no United States, I will still have my citizenship intact.
We are privaleged to watch the end times come and to know that through all of the pain in seeing our beloved country fall to pieces, it is prophecy and proof of the WORD being truth.
Good bye, America, you served your purpose,
His Kingdom Come.
Let us assume that the numbers are sustained through 2016, what will the country look like then?
If anything, these numbers will go up because of our legal immigration policies that allows chain migration and certain categories of immigration without caps.
I did a brief analysis of the Bureau of the Census projections for 2050 since 2000.
Total Population
2000-----403,686,000
2004-----419,854,000
2008-----439,000,000
Hispanic Population
2000-----98,000,000
2004-----102,560,000
2008-----132,800,000
Year when minorities would comprise majority of the population
2000-----2057
2004-----2050
2008-----2042
Milton Friedman said, “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.” Robert Rector, The Heritage Foundation, wrote an excellent article, Importing Poverty: Immigration and Poverty in the United States: A Book of Charts
Immigration, legal and illegal, has had and will continue to have a major and far-reaching impact across a broad spectrum of existential challenges that confront this nation, e.g., national security, the economy/global competitiveness, jobs, health care, taxes, energy independence, education, entitlement reform, law enforcement, social welfare programs, physical infrastructure, the environment, civil liberties, and a continued sense of national identity/shared sense of endeavor. Immigration is the defining issue of our time with enormous implications for the future of this nation and the preservation of our patrimony. Yet, seldom will you hear immigration mentioned by our political and intellectual elites in connection with these challenges.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.