Are we like Rome
Some historians set the start of the decline of the Roman Empire at around the time of Julius Caesar and Augustus. The Roman and US constitutions have a number of likenesses and similar evolution from their beginning until they became essentially a political tool used, interpreted or ignored. The US constitution seems to be at the same “evolutionary” place that the Roman constitution was just before Julius Caesar installed himself as emperor. If this is true and we can use Rome as a template, maybe we can expect the US to drift into a long decline for the next 250 years until Washington D.C. is sacked.
The above scenario would probably fit into a picture of people sitting around in a futuristic fantasy world with embedded electronic devices. Inflation will get out of control while higher and higher taxes are required to fund ever expanding entitlements. The decline will be exacerbated by poverty, cultural decay, loss of borders and language degeneration.
Magic Dog
The above scenario would probably fit into a picture of people sitting around in a futuristic fantasy world with embedded electronic devices. Inflation will get out of control while higher and higher taxes are required to fund ever expanding entitlements. The decline will be exacerbated by poverty, cultural decay, loss of borders and language degeneration.
Magic Dog
IMO,we haven’t got fifty years.
It began to turn with Julius Caesar's bid for power, and within a matter of years it had an emperor, and from then it declined for nearly half a millennium.
We rose in less than half the time, we'll decline in less than half the time. And it will decline for many of the same reasons.
The electronic devices will revolutionize production the same way the transition from agriculture to mass production did. This will destroy most human jobs as we know them but pave the way for much greater production. Poverty will be a problem, but it's relative poverty. People aren't poorer, but new technologies are creating amazing wealth. The cultural decay will be akin to the loss of the culture of the Holy Roman Empire in favor of the Renaissance. The very concept of nation states with _borders_ will turn out to be a short-lived one in history-- just for the 600 year span when we had the ability to travel easily but not so easily we could trade valuable work just by clicking on a computer. The language degeneration will be nothing different from Latin disappearing in favor of the Romance languages or English losing noun case and all verb morphology except for present singular-- just history marching forward.
We complain about taxes and inflation, but our taxes are good (could be better) compared to much of the world. I raise my prices once a year. If inflation is so bad you're having to do it quarterly, maybe you're just creating more value!
The next generation will wonder how we got by without an army of automated machinery to do all the work for us. It will strike us as decadent, but we would have turned work over to robots as past generations turned it over to slaves if we had the chance.
"In the old days of republican Rome, the consuls— there were two of them, so each could keep the other honest, elected for a term of one year to thus prevent dictatorship— had been the executive pinnacle of Roman government. But in the decisive sea battle of Actium in 31 B.C., Octavian had defeated his fellow consul Mark Antony, who had soiled republican virtue by lolling with Cleopatra in Egypt. Nobly seizing the imperial power, Octavian became Augustus Caesar, the first emperor—and the consulships were henceforth transformed into honorary positions, vestigial reminders of republican virtue, and utterly ornamental.
The consulships were not the only ornamental offices in Roman society: the Eternal City was filled with the comings and goings of impotent men— senators, magistrates, bustling administrators of all kinds— performing meaningless duties. Augustus, while seizing all power, had wisely left in place all the republican trappings. The empty show that resulted only emphasized the more the importance of how things were done — since no one wished to advert to the vanity of what was being done. During the four centuries that elapsed from the time of Augustus to the time of Ausonius, the life of the capital turned ever more insubstantial and brittle, so that some ceremony or other, meticulously executed, could become the apogee of a man's life."