We have kids put on Ritalin, psychotropic drugs, and completely unable to make clear headed choices. Has anyone ever read "Brave New World"? Maybe we should put everyone on Somma like in that society, the happy pill. No problems, space out at government insistence, and obey. Goodbye Objectivisim. Give everyone their drug of choice, then manipulate them. I would wish for people to be their own person and be their best. Is the drug culture really doing that for black communities. No one has clearly answered why someone, except medically, needs drugs to get through the day. Anyone, how would this be handled in the Gulch? If everyone lived by fiar trade, and the drug user expressed his freedom to space out, how would he be treated for in the Gulch with no fair trade capacity?

exchange freedom for freebies -- well said!!! -- j
.

Actually, the Republic as it existed since Cincinnatus lasted several hundred years but effectively came to an end at the time Julius Caesar assumed the title of Dictator (the first Caesar). Warnings of such were chronicled by Cicero, effectively heralding the beginning of the end of the great Roman Republic.

Rome was already in a state of decay even at that time finding the Senatorial and the upper classes pandering to the crowds of Rome, opening the granaries providing free grain and even providing free entertainment (sounds a lot like now actually).

Caesar by his ruthlessness, the army under his command and cunning saw the opportunity and seized it. The rest is the sad history or Rome's slow-motion slide into the dustbin of history.

I agree with much of what you have to say other than your timeline for the US. We will not have the luxury of a gradual decay into irrelevance because it will happen (and is happening) sooner rather than later. I give us less than 5 years before we cease to exist as a sovereign nation.

There Are so many parallels, however, I have been trying to track down exactly what the source of these parallels are. I suggest that it just might be cosmic events at the root. Awareness plays a role here.
We are not aware because everything has been confounded, history revised and popularized faux science taught.
So it would seem that those least aware, of their own doing, those that attempt to rule over us, are the Most affected by the cosmic events.
A quick background: Everything moves in cycles. It seems we find ourselves, our sun and our solar system in the heart of a harmful cycle and to beat the band, many other cycles that usually do not coincide are present as well. These events play havoc with the human brain; ex. with a weak magnetic field, the sun going into a minimum, we are no longer properly protected by cosmic and solar radiation. Studies in the 50's discovered the links between these natural events and mental breakdowns, lack of control and at Best...slower reaction times.
I will tell you this...as I have observed over the past few years...of all the things that are happening in our solar system, the other planets and our sun...has yet to happen with the same results here on earth....YET! Just be aware, it works.

This is an interesting thread. The article seems to be in error in a few respects. For example, infanticide by exposure was not an innovation by the Empire, it was a tradition in Europe from ancient times. Romans wrote in amazement that the barbaric Germanic tribes believed that every baby born should be raised. The Egyptians took it further: they would even rescue babies exposed on dung heaps (by Greeks or Romans) and raise them.

Also, Rome continued on past its fall. When the Roman rulers had been deposed by the Visgoths, the Visgoths, in love with Roman culture, became imitation Romans...to the extent of learning Latin. The difference was that rule was openly monarchical and you had to be a Visgoth to get elected to be king.

Civilizations have a life cycle the root dependency of which has been the food supply. Killing off the big game, an ice age, overpopulation, drought...these are the ultimate destroyers of civilizations (with an occasional volcano thrown in for good measure). The parallels with Rome are pretty significant, and I cannot help but be impressed with them, but I do wonder if we are on a different track.

We are more affluent than any other civilization. What is more: we have birth control. Using birth control, the population of the Earth is not likely to get above 10 billion (could be a billion less). Even an ice age would only inconvenience us, not destroy us (but we would long for global warming!).

It is possible that, to reconstruct Stalin's quote: A high quantity of technology has a quality all its own. This may have spun us off the historical track and into a future for which there is scant historical model.

It is very interesting for me to see proposed the idea that the Great Wall of China actually WORKED...and that the Mongols came westward as a consequence, driving all before them.

Jan

I hope not. Caligula was bad enough in an early tech world. Now...brrrr.

Jan

What a wonderful story! I am enchanted.

Jan

Augustus just made permanent a system the outline of which we can see going back toward 100 BC. The rule of Marius and Sulla, who were effectively military dictators, and of course, Julius Caesar, showed that the ability to raise armies had come to matter more than the will of the People or the Senate.

Augustus tried to stabilize this with his permanent imperial role.

Similarly, Roosevelt didn't change the US alone. The kinds of changes he made permanent had been underway for years: the Sherman anti-trust act, the creation of the Fed, and so on. Roosevelt took the anti-capitalist, egalitarian, statist principles to their logical conclusion, and created a "modern" America. It is typical for historians to say that Roosevelt saved capitalism by bringing in full regulation, forced unionization, and the welfare state, which curbs the excesses of laissez-faire. .

Similarly, it was typical in the first century for people to say that Augustus had saved Rome by bringing stability and providing needed authority.

I agree. Parallels are pretty clear. Abortions, infanticide, debased currency, inflation, decline of a standard morality, search for "truth" in a Caesar seem pretty close in both cases.

Typos I don't seem to be able correct now.

"revealed" should be "reveared."

"FT" is "FTC."

Regardless of the quality of the article and its trying to put too much in to short a space, there are similarities to the fall of the Roman Empire and that of the US. Our citizens are losing their patriotism, think nothing of land being sold to foreigners. Our young people are not being educated to love learning, but to be indoctrinated. The Roman culture gave us philosophy and a way of questioning what was going on around us, until they no longer cared. Our culture has become one of people who want to be taken care of, who do not want to even bother to think or question. We give them the arena of TV and movies for distraction distraction and mindless entertainment. Where once we studied Latin, today students study no languages, not even English. They are taught all cultures are of equal value. How can a culture long exist when its citizens are willing to exchange freedom for feebies? Obama's campaign with giant pillars in an arena should have been a foreshadowing of where we are headed.

What is now the standard wheelbase width of both autos and trains was determined by the ruts in Roman roads, which were made by wagons designed to be drawn by two horses side by side (or multiple ranks of two). Both the first trains and the first automobiles were built on wagon chassis out of convenience.

If booster rockets matched that width it would be because they needed to be hauled by truck or train.

So now you know what horse's ass came up with that standard -- two of them.

The Romans set the base for civilization in Europe. When the Romans arrived in Gaul they found neolithic Celts and Barbarians living in thatched roofed mud huts without significant agriculture and wearing animal skins or going naked.

I used to imagine it was this huge thing that happened of a sudden for people of that time. "Holy cow, the Roman Republic has existed for hundreds of years, and last week they changed it to the Roman Empire." I now imagine it was more like the scenario you describe starting in 1940.

You may have heard the probably-apocryphal story about how the size of the space shuttle booster rockets being sized based on a standard set by the size of ancient Roman roads, which were specified by the size of a horse's rear-end.
http://www.astrodigital.org/space/sts...

Ah, I should have written 2200, not 2300, or, more correctly still, 2190 AD (250 years after 1940. My bad. That's still more than a century from now.)

as an engineer, I can testify that the civil, structural,
architectural and mechanical disciplines were
significantly enhanced by the romans. -- j
.

Thank You Sir for your analysis. . I am encouraged
to think of 2300 instead of 2030!!! -- j
.

I don't think much of the article @johnpe1 linked to: it mashes up time periods and treats events taking place over more than 500 years as if they all happened at the same time.

But I, too, see the US as like Rome. Here's how I read the parallels:

In 27 BC, Augustus becomes the first true emperor of Rome. He maintains the forms of republican government, but he is in fact an absolute dictator. The Roman constitution is broken.

But Rome had a great culture. And that culture survived almost in tact until about 220 AD (think of Rome under the 3 good emperors in the 2nd century when it was at its political and economic peak).

But after 220 the nature of imperial rule had become publicly understood as military dictatorship and the empire came to be torn apart by over half a century of near constant civil war and invasion. The empire reconstituted at the end of the 3rd century didn't have the ethic the republic had enjoyed, nor the military techniques the republic had, nor the economic strength of a century before. This was the oppressive Dominate, when emperors were revealed like Eastern potentates and life was heavily controlled. The end came a century later.

OK now on to the US:

Franklin Delano Roosevelt broke the constitution by 1940. The US had grown great on principles of individual rights, the separation of government powers, limited government, and (mostly) economic freedom. Roosevelt used the Supreme Court and a pliant Congress to erect the Administrative state and give the Federal Government unbounded regulatory power over all economic affairs. World War II also put the US as the military guarantee of an alliance of democratic countries: we've been at war pretty steadily ever since and have built up a powerful standing military, something we did not do before the Rooseveltian era.

This Rooseveltian order maintains the forms of the republic of separated powers that went before, but it is becoming increasingly clear that our actual system is a populist dictatorship with the President as king-pro-tem. More and more the "law" that Americans deal with comes from administrative agencies or panels overseen by the Executive Branch: the IRS, the SEC, the EPA, the FT, etc..More and more the Supreme Court finds the dominant governing principles of America in the preamble to and penumbra of the Constitution, rather than the text itself.

But the American culture of reason and achievement, born out of the freer-market 19th century, still lives. (See: my talk "The American Ethic of Success" for more on this: http://atlassociety.org/objectivism/a... )

It took Rome around 250 years to fully lose the great cultural character it had earned during the years of the Republic and become a slavish people dependent on the state and defended by the arms of foreigners.

It may take the US until 2300 to lose its culture of individualism and achievement completely. Already, we can see that the US is slipping down in the indices of political freedom, and many our elites yearn for us to be just like Holland, or nothing special at all. Others, the conservative traditionalists, imagine that Christian religion and military prowess are the hallmarks of our country (they are not the essentials). Already, educated people often just take our success for granted, and demand greater equality or Christian purity, or organic food, or a carbon-free economy, rather than growth and progress.

But these are just parallels. There are many salient differences between Rome and America, and the future is not determined in any case. The future will be what we make it.

Are we ready for Caligula??

"And what have the Romans ever done for us?" See: Life of Brian

People who have wealth

It's passed the point of no return. Slow decline will continue

The parallels exist only in the sense that both governments rose, peaked and declined. In the case of America, the decline is early enough to be remedial. But that window is quickly closing.