What caused the fall of Rome?
A friend sent this link... to a Smithsonian article by Jason Daly entitled: Lessons in the Decline of Democracy From the Ruined Roman Republic.
Daly informs us that Rome fell, in a nutshell, because of violent rhetoric and the disregard of political norms.
In summary:
"The example of the Roman Republic shows the result of not policing those norms and keeping violence in check is the potential loss of democracy. “No republic is eternal,” Watts writes. “It lives only as long as its citizens want it. And, in both the 21stcentury A.D. and the first century B.C., when a republic fails to work as intended, its citizens are capable of choosing the stability of autocratic rule over the chaos of a broken republic.”
As Lawrence W. Reed says in the opening of his essay, Are We Rome?
"Monumental sums for bailouts. Staggering increases in public debt. Concentration of power in the central government. A mad scramble by interest groups with endless claims on the treasury. Mushrooming regulations on enterprise. Demagogic class warfare appeals. Higher taxes on the productive. Decline of virtues once widely embraced as essential for strong character. These things ring familiar in twenty-first century America just as surely as they dominated the ill-fated Roman welfare state of two millennia ago."
Read the essay at FEE.org here...(pdf)
This is an interesting subject considering the goings on with our neighbour to the Northwest and even here at home.
If you are interested, find out more here...
