Ayn Rand remains such a philosopher. She may never have used quite the same words as Voltaire, but she might have written or said something like, "Absurd premises lead to catastrophically real consequences."

I would enlarge on your statement that "fake money" is one of the harbingers of national decline. In fact government currency is the slippery slope that inevitably leads to "fake money."

All it takes is one "national emergency" such as war (often contemplated only because of government control/issuance of money & banking) to hasten the slippery-slope collapse.

There are some modern day philosophers such as Molyneux who believe we are entering a new Dark Age. A “fourth turning” as it were. The old cyclical “weak men make hard times” etc….is timeless and true. It is just our ill luck to be living during one of the declines.
We should look around and write this all down for our descendants. When they inevitably ask “How could they have been so stupid?!” Make sure they know SOME of us weren’t.
The recipe, in my opinion, for the death of a nation boils down to two things…..cheap, unskilled labor and fake money. No matter what, those two factors will lead to an eventual societal and economic collapse. Every other bump on the road to unenlightenment is exacerbated by those two things.
That means the slave ships should have been turned away from our shores. And the Creature from Jekyll Island should have been vanquished before it was able to cast it’s illusion of prosperity over the land.
TANSTAAFL……or as Great Grandpa Alfonse used to say…”Anything FREE is worth saving up for.”

He was a man of the Enlightenment.What will today's philosophers be known as -the Unenlightment?

+1 to all of that.

Me dino was going to write roughly the same thing until I read my way down to your reply at the bottom of this page.
Was gonna add~~Then we start cancelling if not incriminating everyone with the common sense to disagree.

Start by floating the absurdity that men can be women, or women can be men; witness atrocity in castrating toddlers, or tomboy girls at age five or six having mastectomies.

Makes you wonder how these people were such forward seeing people.A group of men put their heads together and conceived of this idea. And you wouldn't believe who they were. N

My favorite Voltaire quote. Been saying it for years...

We're seeing the attempt by MSM, SocM influencers attempting to make the public at large accept greater and greater absurdities as "new normal" reality.

According to Voltaire, complacence with/participation in greater and greater atrocities can therefore be expected as forthcoming from that portion of the public willing to accept or not actively reject currently floated absurdities.