rome and socialism
A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to visit Rome and stand in the ruins of the Forum. Nothing else quite conveys the grandeur and greatness of Roman civilization. A recent book, The Rise of Rome, explains the reasons for this success. They’re the same reasons the U.S. grew great – “favorable conditions for production and trade.” The market economy, with its trade and commerce, built Rome.
To explain the downfall of the Roman Empire, I rely on the famous historians Will and Ariel Durant. “To support officialdom – the army, the court, public works, and the dole – taxation rose to such heights that men lost incentive to work or earn, and a corrosive contest began between lawyers finding devices to evade taxes and lawyers formulating laws to prevent evasion. Thousands of Romans, to escape the tax gatherer, fled over the frontiers to seek refuge among the barbarians.” Doesn’t that sound familiar? The same high taxes, big government and excessive regulation that destroyed a once prosperous Roman civilization are in the process of doing the same thing here. Rome began to penalize the successful with confiscatory taxation and reward the unproductive with free bread and entertainment. Eventually under the Emperor Diocletian in 301 A.D., Rome fully embraced socialism. The bureaucrats feathered their own nests and Roman civilization withered and died.
Author Charles Hugh Smith writes, “The costs of free bread and other foodstuffs and public entertainments (‘bread and circuses’) exhausted the Imperial coffers. Originally intended to alleviate the suffering of the poor, the free bread program had expanded from feeding 40,000 citizens of Rome in 71 B.C. to 320,000 under Augustus – roughly one-third of the entire populace of Rome. Costly entertainments such as bloody gladiator fights that had once been staged on rare public holidays were commonplace by the late Empire, another drain on the state coffers.”
The great economist Ludwig von Mises explained why Rome failed and why we may fail. “Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build; it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created.” Mises went on to explain what happens to a civilization that embraces government intervention and socialism. “A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.”
It should be clear to any observer that we are moving away from the things that made us great – limited government, low taxes, free markets, and a rugged individualism that spurned the dole. We cannot survive socialism with any semblance of American greatness. The U.S. with its deficits and runaway government spending is doing a financial high wire act. The Romans never saw their collapse coming. Most Americans are equally clueless. Nothing is so blind as the citizenry of a civilization in decline.