BTW - It's gone down substantially this year.
Posted on 08/31/2007 5:56:55 AM PDT by Greg F
Are we Rome? Is America like the Roman Empire - you know, Declining and Falling, and all that?
No less than the comptroller general of the United States, David Walker, answers yes, citing "striking similarities" between America today and Rome then. And while it's tempting - at a time of falling bridges, faltering currencies and failing foreign wars - to spot ominous parallels, one huge difference exists, which happily is still in our power to control.
Walker, head of the federal-watchdogging Government Accountability Office, has been warning for years against unsustainable financial deficits. But he went much further this month when he described Washington, D.C., as a "burning platform," adding to the litany of woes: "declining moral values and political civility at home, an overconfident and overextended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government."
So yes, the idea is in the air - as it always has been in the West. Why? Because the Roman Empire was the greatest politico-military achievement of all time. For the better part of six centuries, one city in Italy managed to control much of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
Given that huge historical footprint, it's little wonder that Rome is always popping up in culture, as well as politics. A just-opened movie, "The Last Legion," recounts yet another a tale about the fall of the Western Roman Empire, in AD 476.
And it was exactly 1,300 years later, in 1776, that two Rome-inspired events took place. The first, of course, was the American Revolution and the subsequent establishing of a new republic. The founders were English-speakers, but as they looked around for political inspiration, they settled on the ancient Roman Republic, even dredging up such Latin-derived official titles such as president, senator and supreme court justice.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsday.com ...
Go and search “America decline” or “USA decline” and you will get hundreds hundreds of articles and books who predicted doom and gloom for the USA since the 1950’s. It did not happen and the US will be the ultimate world Super Power for at least the next 100 years.
Did you read the article in full. It’s not doom and gloom. I am not sure I agree with you that the USA will be dominant for another 100 years however, that’s a long time and there are a lot of threats and rising powers. Pinkerton’s point is that nations can endure for millenia while empires end in a few hundred years.
This statement is confusing. US military expeditions abroad were never and are not initiated or carried out for territorial gain. When the fight is over, the US military packs up and comes home. Unlike the Roman model, which remained in place oppressing the indigenous people, conscripting their sons and helping themselves to everything worth having. The Philippines, Vietnam and Iraq are not places the US military has been sent so that America can help itself to their countries’ wealth or turf.
US military expeditions abroad were never and are not initiated or carried out for territorial gain.
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I guess the concern is the neo-con and globalist view of America. We may not remain as permanent occupiers (debatable given the extent of our military base network) but we step in to restore order, protect economic interests, elimate threats to an international order of which we are the leading nation. We can lose almost all of that power and still be a nation. We cannot lose the nation and retain that power.
Nationalism has produced lots of wars and other troubles. Wilson and his wrongheaded self-determination left us a legacy of much suffering.
BTW - It's gone down substantially this year.
He's right. the Founders used Roman law & government to construct our society.
Originally, there were 3 classes of 'persons' in our country:
Libertini – freemen (i.e. Citizens of the several States)
Latins – denizens (i.e. residents, but not citizens … or what we call ‘illegals’)
Dedititii - slaves
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Among the Romans, the libertini, or freedmen, were formerly distinguished by a threefold division.‡
They, sometimes obtained what was called the greater liberty, thereby becoming Roman citizens. To this privilege, those who were enfranchised by testament, by the census, or by the vindicta, appear to have been alone admitted:
sometimes they obtained the lesser liberty only, and became Latins; whose condition is thus described by Justinian: "They never enjoyed the right of succession [to estates] .... For although they led the lives of free men, yet, with their last breath they lost both their lives and liberties; for their possessions, like the goods of slaves, were detained by the manumittor.
"§ Sometimes they obtained only the inferior liberty, being called dedititii: such were slaves
St. George Tucker’s VIEW OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES
(Tucker's View of the Constitution was written in 1803 at the request of Congress)
To this point, there is no strong AND benevolent power on earth like the US. Despite our own internal and sometimes very public discord, over time the US strives continually to mediate for peace and maintain the necessary political/military/social equilibrium FOR peace. Until or unless an equally strong and so motivated power forces the US out of preeminence, it IS all about us... even for our enemies.
U.S. Public Debt as a % of GDP is 64.7% according to the CIA Factbook, ranking us right along side France, Germany, Austria, Canada, etc.
What is the average American’s mortgage (and all other debt) as a percent of their annual income? If you’ve paid off half of your median $230K home, you have about $115K in debt, which is about 200% of household income, IIRC.
So the Government can probably service its debt better than the average homeowner.
Yawn.
It’s the out year commitments in entitlements that are going to hurt us. The CBO says we have to increase tax receipts or reduce spending by 20% starting today and going for 75 years to keep the budget in balance. They say that spending is currently unsustainable. Since this isn’t likely to happen the debt is going to grow. CBO says it’s “unsustainable.”
To this point, there is no strong AND benevolent power on earth like the US.
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Historically, the dominant powers have not been benevolent.
Moral decline will lead to financial ruin.
His point about Italy is just wrong.
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Yes and no. The fact that they were independent principalities no more detracted from their national character than the independent Greek city states detracted from their national (civilization) character.
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Empires are probably the best form of government.
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I strongly disagree. No empire in history has led to freedom and rights for those governed by the imperial power.
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Nationalism has produced lots of wars and other troubles.
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As has every other form of governmental organization. War and troubles are part of the human condition.
AND I heartily wish our allies AND our enemies would allow this fact, even if they DO NOT agree with our ‘culture’ or policies. THAT I would have to respect... but for them to go on slamming the openhanded Christian goodness of our country and our people while (both enemies and allies) enjoying the benefits of our generosity and goodness is really too much!!
I remember reading about some women who had been prisoners in a German slave labor camp and were nearly dead on their feet while they watched American liberators march into their town. These two had lost absolutely EVERYTHING ... family members, friends, homes, health, everything and were nearly dead by the time it was over... After years of slavery and starvation and though they had never in their lives seen or known any Americans, these two Hungarian girls said when they saw soldiers with American insignia on their arms walking into their town , they both immediately and uncontrollably wept for joy because at that instant they KNEW they were saved, would get decent treatment and that were going to live. What other country on earth, just by it's insignia can claim that?
Amen brother.
Our preeminence on the world stage corresponds directly with the level of freedom our citizens enjoy. The decline of the former will occur at the same pace, and in direct proportion to the decline of the latter.
I'll agree to that. Soc Sec, Medicare, Prescription Drugs, etc. are a Ponzi Scheme that will implode. Current deficits are manageable; the baked-in future liabilities are completely unsustainable.
There are many differences between America and Rome.
To begin with: America is and always has been a benevolent nation, committed from the beginning to inalienable human rights, endowed to all people by their Creator, and, from the beginning, the American Dream has been universal liberty, justice, and prosperity for all the people of the world.
It is true that Americans have not always lived up to their ideals.
From the beginning, central to the American nation, was slavery--a shocking repudiation of the ideals of the nation and its very foundation.
However, it is also true that Americans fought the bloodiest and most deadly war in their history, the fratricidal Civil War, and put themselves through the difficult and sometimes bloody Civil Rights Revolution to bring America into conformity with its ideals and fulfillment of the American Dream.
There is still a way to go, but America shows every sign of evolving finally into the nation whose ideals and whose Dreams her people set as objectives for themselves and for which they have always longed and, all things taken into account, struggled.
America has never renounced her ideals or the American Dream!
America is and always has been a fundamentally benevolent nation.
Furthermore, the very ideals and Dream of America have produced the great American bourgeoisie--the very classless society of which so many throughout history have dreamed and which so many of the malevolent (Hitler, Stalin, and Karl Marx come immediately to mind) have promised with disastrous results.
And the United States, because of its ideals, its Dream, and its fundamental benevolence, has evolved, almost unwittingly, into the greatest, richest, most powerful--and most benevolent--nation the world has ever known.
All this is not true of Rome.
From its beginning, Rome was a brutal nation, based on slavery, violence, cruelty, luxury for the ruling oligarchy, scorn for everyone else and indifference to their exploitation and misery--whose very entertainment, from before the founding of the nation, was heartless, brutal violence and the slaughter of the helpless. Rome was soul-sick from its beginning and evolved even lower. Relatively late in its existence, for example, Romans, with the sanction of their state, watched children and blind people slaughter one another for public entertainment and considered it slapstick comedy, entertained themselves by watching torture, rape, and the slaughter of humans and animals.
America was NEVER like that. Americans never stooped to such depravity. The United States government never sanctions such extremes of brutality. Though, it is true, that slavery and all its horrors produced a de facto brutality that came close, the actual enjoyment of its brutality was always denied and fought against. Rome revelled in it.
America outlawed slavery less than ninety years after the establishment of the nation. Rome never did, in more than five hundred years of its existence.
With the outlaw of institutionalized racism, two hundred years after the founding of the Republic, Americans outlawed brutality--and discrimination--against people, taking another giant step toward fulfillment of their ideals and their Dream.
America has always evolved toward benevolence.
Rome never evolved away from the most hideous brutality.
However, there is one big similarity between America and Rome: Rome was destroyed, from within, by decadence. The great and most realistic threat to America's destruction is the same thing: decadence.
American decadence is the Left. The Democrat Party is its political machine. The mainstream newsmedia is its propaganda machine. It is a fifth column in de facto alliance with America's enemies abroad and their enabler.
If this decadence--the Left--is not stopped, it will destroy America as surely as Roman decadence destroyed Rome.
Rome could not have been destroyed by its enemies abroad if it had not first been weakened and ultimately destroyed by the decadence within.
America's enemies abroad can not destroy the United States. However, the decadence embodied in the Left, if not stopped, will destroy the United States from within and leave her vulnerable to destruction by her enemies abroad.
This is the great similarity between Rome and the United States, and this is why Americans must struggle so courageously against the Left.
Great post.
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