0:02 - Introduction to the Fall of Rome
3:22 - Understanding History's Importance
5:10 - The Significance of Roman History
6:44 - Theories Behind Rome's Fall
8:00 - Political Correctness and Its Impact
11:26 - The Scale of the Roman Empire
13:34 - The Dynamics of Roman Citizenship
16:14 - Roman Engineering and Society
20:06 - Cultural Foundations of Rome
23:38 - The Demographics of Ancient Rome
25:16 - The Role of Slavery in Rome
30:15 - The Stability of Roman Governance
38:15 - The Function of Citizenship
42:43 - The Crisis of Roman Identity
47:53 - The Cultural Impact of Conquest
53:29 - Economic Dynamics of the Empire
58:02 - The Role of Welfare in Rome
1:02:45 - Monetary Policy and Its Consequences
1:12:26 - The Consequences of Currency Debasement
1:31:13 - The Rise of Currency Issues
1:33:10 - The Changing Role of Women
1:35:31 - The Growth of the Welfare State
1:44:19 - Taxation and Economic Collapse
1:55:46 - The Dangers of Mercenaries
2:03:38 - The Fall of the Roman Empire
2:06:41 - The Lessons of History
2:20:28 - The Cycle of Civilization
2:28:36 - A Call to Remember Heroes
This lecture by Stefan Molyneux titled "The Fall of Rome" engages with the historical and philosophical ramifications of the collapse of one of history's greatest empires and draws parallels with contemporary Western civilization. Molyneux emphasizes the critical importance of understanding one's history, arguing that much of what is taught is distorted by political agendas. He contends that the decline of Rome should be studied not merely for its historical significance but as an urgent call to action to prevent the perceived decline of the West.
The lecture refrains from chronological storytelling; instead, Molyneux adopts a thematic approach to analyze the multifaceted decisions and actions that led to Rome’s decline. He posits that the decisions made by individuals and leaders, as well as societal adherence to tradition and values, played a pivotal role in the empire's fate. Molyneux references the cyclical nature of history, noting that civilizations often undergo cycles of rise and fall, driven by the collective choices of their leaders and societies.
Molyneux critiques various popular explanations for the fall of Rome, addressing theories ranging from disease to climate change, which he views as inadequate and diverting attention from the root causes. He highlights the internal issues faced by Rome, including corruption, economic mismanagement, and a shift in societal values away from civic duty and responsibility. The lecturer points out that as the empire expanded and incorporated diverse cultures, the original unifying values began to fray, resulting in increased ethnic and tribal conflicts.
The lecture further explores the implications of Rome's economic decisions, particularly the reliance on a welfare system and extensive taxation that drained productivity and fostered dependency. Molyneux draws a stark comparison between ancient Rome and modern Western nations, underscoring the dangers of a burgeoning welfare state and the erosion of individual freedoms. He argues that historical parallels can still be drawn, suggesting that unchecked government expansion and a failure to uphold moral and civic values endanger the future of contemporary societies.
Molyneux reflects on the separation of citizenship from cultural values, asserting that simply granting citizenship does not engender loyalty or a sense of shared identity among diverse populations. This point is illustrated by the plight of those seeking refuge within Roman territories, who, rather than assimilating into Roman culture, retained their original loyalties, further complicating the socio-political landscape.
As the lecture delves deeper, Molyneux discusses the decline of the Roman family unit and societal norms, linking this breakdown to the rise of moral decay and hedonism within the empire. He makes a strong case that social and familial structures are foundational to the stability of a civilization, and their decay can foreshadow greater societal collapse.
The lecturer asserts that the lessons from Rome's fall present a blueprint for modern societies to avoid similar pitfalls. He implores listeners to cultivate values of personal responsibility, self-discipline, and an understanding of historical context to foster a resilient civilization. Concluding his remarks, Molyneux urges his audience to reclaim pride in their civilizations and their historical achievements, arguing that only by understanding and learning from the past can societies hope to navigate the challenges of the present and future.
Through this multi-faceted examination, Molyneux challenges listeners to critically assess the structures and values that underpin their societies, emphasizing that the preservation of Western civilization is contingent upon the dissemination of rational principles, appreciation of history, and commitment to fostering individual liberties.
[0:00] Hi, everybody. This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain.
[0:02] I hope you're doing well. This is the fall of Rome, and I'm going to make a request and give you some context for this. Please do not be doing other things while this is going on. Focus on this presentation. Watch it if you can. Listen if you must, but focus on this presentation. This is essential. Hey, I don't mind being background sometimes. Throw me on while you're playing a video game. I don't care. But this one you need because this is about saving Western civilization.
[0:31] We look deep into the past so that we can control the future. And your past has been so falsified to you, so lied about. You know, they constantly say, oh, the only thing that's constant in history is how little people learn from their history. No, you can absolutely learn from your history. You can save everything that our ancestors worked so hard to provide to us. But you must first know the facts about your history, and when you understand the facts about your history, which have been so falsified that you live in a matrix of leftist propaganda rather than any basic empirical facts, once you understand your history, we can, we might have the possibility with this technology, this new Gutenberg press of the internet, we might have the chance of stopping the ten generation cycle of empire, cycle of civilization in its tracks. We might be able to pile up enough facts, recent evidence, and knowledge, and courage that we can stop the giant, grim stone wheel of history from crushing yet another civilization as it seems poised to do with the West. So at the moment, there's not much that's more important for you to learn, to know, to understand than the fall of Rome.
[1:44] Now, why are you lied to about your history? Well, because people who want power over you, political leaders, sophists, the controllers, the masters, they profit if they get to keep making the same historical mistakes over and over and over again.
[2:01] And we're going to go into all of those mistakes, and you will be shocked, appalled, and I hope thrilled, excited, and motivated by realizing just how much is the same. As I've said before, history is the same damn story told over and over and over again with different costumes. But we are going to stop all of that. My express goal in founding this show, this conversation, Freedom Aid Radio, has been to save Western civilization, which I believe is civilization. And over the last 10 years, we've done thousands of shows here, had hundreds of interviews and conversations. We're now doing 10 to 15 million views and downloads every single month. That is enough momentum to change and turn back and hold back the tide of history that seems to swamp and drown us all. So please focus on this, I beg of you. Now, I'm going to generalize, and I'm not going to go in sequence. When I was in college, I took a course or had inflicted upon me, a course in Roman history which was, and then there was this emperor, and then there was this emperor, and then this happened, and then this happened, and it's just this dull conveyor belt of detritus that adds up to nothing in terms of really powerful and motivating and energizing historical knowledge. And so.
[3:23] That is really, really important to understand. I'm not going to go in sequence. I'm going to jump around because I'm looking for themes that we can act on in the here and now rather than and then this and then this and then this, which I don't find helps people at all. So this is not a chronological examination of the fall of Rome. And chronology implies dominoes, you know, like, well, this happened and this happened. It gives you the sense of inevitability. nothing can change. You can't stop it. But I'm interested in the decisions that are made and seeing the effects of those decisions. You know, we make relatively little decisions. They grow enormously rapidly into the tombstones that cast the shadows that cause the flowers of our civilization to expire in darkness. So, I'm looking at the decisions. Because in the absence of ignorance, when we have knowledge, nothing is inevitable. You know, people argue free will versus determinism. I'm very much on the free will side, because when you have enough knowledge, you can make the choices that can save yourself. If you don't know smoking is bad for you, are you going to quit? No. And so we aim aiming to give you the knowledge to stop the giant grim wheel of history from crushing yet another civilization because with the technology that this civilization has created and propagated, promulgated throughout the world.
[4:39] It may be that if our civilization falls, none will ever rise thereafter. after. Lord Acton, you may know him from the famous statement that power tends to corrupt, absolute power tends to corrupt, absolutely. Lord Acton said that historical thought is far more important than historical knowledge, and that is essential. I myself have a master's in history from a very good university, but I'm going to try and give you what I did not get from that master's so that we can change the entire course of history.
[5:11] Sound like a teaser? Sound like a plan? Let's start diving in, shall we? To the fall of Rome.
[5:18] So, the Roman Empire, why does it matter? Why do we care? Well, it is in fact pretty much everything to the West. It is the foundation upon which so much of our civilization is built. Look at Roman law. The rediscovery of Roman law in the early to middle ages was essential for organizing disputes and organizing property and organizing conflicts within cities, right? I mean, Once you had, in the early Middle Ages, you had amazing agricultural improvements, which created the excess food that you need to have cities. You can't have cities when everyone's on subsistence food, because there's nothing excess to sell to the cities, so you can't have a city. Rediscovery of Roman law. Our language in the West, pretty much all founded on Latin, of course. The culture, the very way in which we conceive of and build cities, the governmental structures that we have all trace their origins back to the Roman Empire. Some, of course, go further, back into the Greeks and other empires, but the Roman Empire, to understand that is to understand so much about the West. I mean, just look at the capital in Washington. Even the architecture of our governments is Roman, and so this is really important.
[6:29] So, if we've built so much of the West on Rome, we've got to know why it fell, because if it fell, and we don't even know why, we're going to fall as well. And that is a process of the fall of the West that is already far advanced.
[6:44] Not so far that we can't tilt back this inevitability, push back these dominoes, maybe even go the other way, but it is already fairly far advanced.
[6:54] So, there's a lot of theories about why Rome fell. Ah, the Romans caught malaria, you see. They went to Africa, and Lord knows what does Africa give you. Lots of pleasant diseases. So, they got malaria, and as a result, they became very sort of tired, and no energy, and so on, and lost the will to continue. Ah, lead in the pipes, lead in the glaze of their cooking pots, poison, and therefore, therefore. They became orgy, and sex-obsessed, and therefore, collapse. The growth of Christianity created a pacifism, fatalism, and this preoccupation with life after death, a kind of nihilism of focusing on heaven or hell rather than organization and defense in the secular realm. These are all theories and more, of course, that have been advanced, and I'm going to point out with my usual modesty why I think they're just a little short of the mark. So we're going to go through in this conversation and talk about why Rome fell, why it matters today more than ever, and what can be done about our own decline.
[8:01] But this knowledge, I'm almost not even going to have to tell you what we need to do to prevent and reverse our own decline.
[8:08] And we're going to go from there. The answers are obvious that political correctness prevents us from talking about them. And that's really the point of political correctness. If you want to know what political correctness really is? It is an attack, a verbal attack, a torrent of verbal abuse on any knowledge that would serve to limit state power. State grows and grows. It metastasizes its cancer. The government grows and grows. Anything which pushes back against that, any group which is naturally inclined to push back against that, yeah, looking at you white males, is attacked by the vicious verbal abuse of political correctness.
[8:43] Now, what's interesting about Rome is there were earlier empires, the Assyrian and the Persian Empire, but Rome didn't succumb to either war or revolution. On the very last day, see, I told you we weren't going to go chronologically. On the very last day of the empire, a barbarian member of the German tribe, Ciri, and a former commander of the Roman army entered Rome unopposed.
[9:10] The one time, God-given, it seemed, military and financial power of the Mediterranean was unable to resist. Now, by the time he entered the city, Roman control of Spain and Gaul, France-ish, Britain and North Africa had already been lost to the Goths and the Vandals. See, Vandals. Even those words for those tribes continue in our language. And of course, everybody knows that Rome was encircled by barbarians. They called them barbarians because they really couldn't understand. They didn't speak Latin originally, of course, and they didn't know what the hell they were saying. So they said, well, they sound like this to me, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so they became barbarians, barbarians is why they were called that.
[9:55] And there was always this pressure from the northern barbarians. This had occurred for centuries. The army had, since the time of Julius Caesar, kept fighting and pushing back or sometimes incorporating these barbarians. And some of the emperors had let them in. Some had tried to buy them off. And some of them had said, hey, come on in. We really need you to join the army because we're running out of Roman citizens to conscript.
[10:21] But the big problem was, of course, as the barbarians, here's where you need to focus, right? As the barbarians came into Rome, they really kept their former culture and tribal loyalties, ethnicities, and religions. So even if they got citizenship in Rome, which started to be handed out like candy towards the end of the Roman Empire, they came in. And as long as things were going well, as long as the empire had lots of money and stuff, everybody was fine. Oh, the old tribal loyalties are not much of a problem. But when the empire began to run out of money, when destabilization began to occur, all of the old cracks and fissures of ethnic and tribal conflicts, racial conflicts began to emerge, began to fester, and they all began to turn on each other. And they quickly found even those who joined the army had loyalties more to their old tribal ethnicities and their tribal religions, their tribes as a whole, than they did to Rome itself. So, multiculturalism, we'll be talking about that in the conversation.
[11:27] So, what are we talking about? How big? It's staggeringly huge. It makes the European Union or even the old Soviet Empire look like a drop in a bucket. Roman Empire, we're talking sort of first of century AD, It stretched from the moors of Scotland to the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys of Iraq. Scotland to Iraq. Yes, that's quite a backpacking journey. And it went from the northern seas of Germany to the golden sands of the Sahara. Germany, Sahara. Scotland to Iraq. That is big, ladies and gentlemen.
[12:07] So today, let's just say today, you wanted to journey that distance. Well, you'd need to know, I don't know what, a dozen languages or more. You'd need to get all these different visas. You'd need to switch your currency around. But then, at that time, from Scotland to Iraq, from Germany, north of Germany, down to the Sahara, they built Hadrian's Wall because the Scots, well, need I say more. Sheep and test signs for dinner, no thanks. We're building a wall. Keep you people out. Actually, I like Scotland, but anyway.
[12:35] So back in the day, I mean, back quite a few days ago, you could travel this entire massive distance with your Roman currency being accepted almost everywhere. And if you had Latin and perhaps sometimes Greek, you could travel the whole length and breadth of this empire in relative safety protected by one legal system. One legal system. This is a truly astonishing feat in human history. So St. Paul from La Bible. So using just Greek he could go throughout the entire empire preaching and just about everyone could understand him now the citizenship was a big deal so at one point St. Paul was arrested and threatened with a beating and he showed his citizenship papers and the tribune said where did you get those? How did you get them? they cost me a huge bride to get to be a Roman citizen the tribune is then terrified that St.
[13:34] Paul is going to bring him up on charges of violating his civil rights. Now, the sort of smoky, prehistoric, tribal, fractured, bloodshed warfare history of Rome before, of this region, right, all this way from Scotland to Iraq and North Germany down to the Sahara, was a giant bloody mess. So this was a huge spread of relative peace and stability for centuries. And that is really, really quite an astonishing thing.
[14:03] And, okay, not the best technologists in the world, but good engineers, great engineers. In Rome, there's a bridge built in 63 BC that still carries traffic. No planned obsolescence in ancient Roman structures. And all over the empire, not just in Rome, pure water was brought through aqueducts that gave the ordinary Roman a larger supply of pure, fresh, delicious drinking water than an inhabitant of Chicago or Paris had even in the 1920s. Even, I just think of that.
[14:41] He had better water in ancient Rome than Paris or Chicago in the 1920s, or I guess Flint. Now, now, this is the mind-blowing aspect of it. Just put this into your cogitator and take it for a hamster wheel spin. For all of this peace, all of this amazing public infrastructure, These roads, the astonishing roads that were really the backbone of the army's strength. The legal system, the soldiers, the courts, everything. For all of this, the ordinary Roman citizen worked for only two days a year to pay his taxes. Let me say it again, brothers and sisters. The ordinary Roman citizen worked for only two days a year to pay his taxes. Okay, a little bit more at the end, which we'll get to, but just think of that. Just think of that. So.
[15:41] Gibbon, one of the famous historians who really knew the history of Rome and, you know, turned his hands into arthritic claws writing all this stuff out. He wrote once, he said that if a person were to pick the one period in the history of the human race when mankind was happiest, he would, without hesitation, choose that period of the second century AD, when Rome was stable, when peace reigned, and trade reigned throughout the empire. Trade was constantly rising and falling as empires rose and fall. And that is really, really astonishing to think about.
[16:15] Now, of course, Rome was writing prior to the modern period, but this period of the second century AD, just a truly astounding, not even crack or glimpse, but amazing panoply of relative freedoms.
[16:29] Now, the Romans, there's an argument, and I think it's not bad. The argument goes something like this, that the Greeks philosophically were really creative, but the Romans, bureaucratically and from an engineering standpoint, were extremely practical, not quite as innovative. They were better at law, not as good at things like metaphysics and epistemology, but then why bother if the Greeks have done such a good job, which particularly with Aristotle, I've done another presentation on him, since the Greeks did such a good job with those things for the most part, why bother? Why bother trying to improve upon them? But the Romans did understand that freedom, they understood the concept of freedom. Can you imagine working for all of this for two days a year, pay your entire taxes?
[17:13] So three components of freedom. National freedom, which means freedom from foreign domination. Political freedom, and that means the freedom to not be aggressed against by the state, aggressed against by the state to have your rights, as St. Paul challenged the Tribune with. And the freedom to vote and choose your magistrates. And finally, individual freedom. Do what you will, though it harm no other. Live as you choose as long as you do not initiate force or fraud against others. So national freedom, do not be dominated by other cultures or armies in particular, political freedom and individual freedom. And these values.
[17:59] You kind of, it's hard to find a good way to put it, but these values, you kind of have to massage them into a cultural brain almost from birth onwards. To nudge values into the human mind is very easy to do if you have consistent access to children, very hard to do later on. I mean, just imagine if you moved to Saudi Arabia, how long would it take for you to feel fully at home and fully comfortable and fully acculturated? If, let's say, you move there when you're 20 or whatever, the answer would be, you would never ever feel that, and your children would feel torn, and their children, and so on, right? So this is why these things are important. Hello, Europe, I'm also talking to you as well. So these sort of three components, the sort of tripod that is the base of the Roman conception of freedom, did not match as well with what the Greeks thought, with what the Africans thought, with what the Gauls, with what the Germans and the Egyptians in particular, they were conquered and given citizenship, but citizenship should grow out of the values being inculcated into the individual from an early age, not just, here are your papers, now you're just like us, you know? And when you move a hamster from a hamster cage into an aquarium, it doesn't become a fish, right? So, this is really important to understand that the culture of Rome was one of the things that was foundational to its success, as we'll talk about. And so, as a result of that, citizenship was important, but citizenship was.
[19:27] Something that grew out of the fertilization of particular values in the minds of children. It couldn't just be written on a piece of paper and handed out. It's not like learning a language, right? I mean, if I go to Japan and somebody writes some stuff to me, says, you speak Japanese, and hands it to me, I don't speak Japanese. I've got to spend years learning how to speak Japanese. And so thinking that citizenship somehow magically creates lifelong values and understandings and emotional perspectives in people's minds, that culture can be transferred by a piece of paper.
[19:58] How's that working out for us? Well, the Romans would have, if they could, and I'm trying to channel them, they would tell us it doesn't work out at all.
[20:07] And this is something that is going on in America as well, right? American identity. And it now means many different things to many different people. And as America begins to run out of money, we see these cracks, these fissures beginning to show up and expand, right? It was originally white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, the old WASP. That was what it meant to be an American, for the most part. And now being American, like being Roman back in the day, is not part of being a particular ethnicity or a particular even culture. It's just whoever's around who's willing to jump through the hoops to get the papers and this is really, really important and we're going to go through the effects of this as we continue to talk. So, this is a map. Just, I mean, this sort of top left part would be the European Union. Just look how big this is. This is 5 million plus square kilometers. 5 million plus square kilometers.
[21:13] Now, demographically, the Roman Empire, let's just, I'm just going to let you, you can zoom in if you want. I don't know if it's YouTube, but you can have a look at this. Hi, Def, you know, get your microscope out. Have a look at this while I just tell you about it. So demographically, it's a pretty ordinary pre-modern state. Really high, well, relatively high infant mortality. People got married pretty early on and very high fertility within marriage. So infant mortality was brutal. About half of Roman subjects died by the age of five. And of those who were still alive at the age of 10, about half of those would die by the age of 50. and Roman women, on average, would have between six and nine children. Huh, I think there are other groups in society currently with that levels of fertility as well.
[22:00] And during the second century CE, the city of Rome had like a million people in it. Now, there's no Western city that had a million people until the 19th century. So, millennia and three quarters or whatever it took. to get back to the size of Rome in the West.
[22:21] Now, what would become the territory of the Roman Empire saw an average annual population growth of about 0.1%. Now, this is from this 12th century before the Common Era to the 3rd century. Sorry, 3rd century. So, 12th century BCE to the 3rd century CE. Now, 0.1% doesn't sound that much, But what happens is, from 12th century BCE to 3rd century CE, it's a quadrupling of the region's total population. Four, count them four times, and that's really, really important. Now, if you take the high infant mortality rate, then the Roman Empire had a life expectancy of about 25 years. But when you get rid of that sort of 5 to 10 thing, life expectancy is doubled to the late 50s, right? So you get a much longer life. If you survive childhood, you get a much longer life expectancy. And so if a Roman survived until their mid-teens, they could get almost six decades of life, which is similar to India in the early 20th century, or China in the early 20th century. So again, an enormously beneficial environment.
[23:34] Now, this is common to all pre-modern societies. How did people die?
[23:39] Well, how do people die now? Well, they have these chronic end-of-life, godforsaken, wasting things that happen, heart disease and cancer and so on. That's not, I mean, that's if you survive in the modern age, which you're likely to do, you're going to get these chronic end-of-life conditions. That's not how it went down in the ancient world. It was not even malnutrition, because this was, of course, you can read the 10,000-year explosion, but this was long after agriculture had been pretty well refined, and you'd had thousands and thousands of years of crop rotation, experimentation, and selective breeding for the most productive livestock, and so on. And so, you didn't die of old age, you didn't die of wasting diseases in general.
[24:20] Sort of end-of-life chronic diseases and dysfunctions, what you did die of was acute infectious diseases. Boom! Those germs were pretty much the masters of the universe back then. Pulmonary tuberculosis characterized a huge amount of the Roman region back in the day. And what happens is when you get that kind of tuberculosis, you tend to die in your early 20s, that's why you see the life tables in rome said a significant dip so.
[24:51] There's a big question, why didn't Rome ever figure out how to have an industrial revolution like the West did after the agricultural revolution of the mid to late Middle Ages? You get the industrial revolution starting in the late 18th and into the 19th century, which, you know, most of human history is like subsistence, subsistence, and it kind of blows through the stratosphere in productivity over the last 200 years or so. Why didn't that happen? Ancient Romans knew about the steam engine. They knew about engineering.
[25:17] They knew about a lot of things, and we'll get into the effects of slavery in a bit. But mortality on this scale is pretty tough for economic growth it discourages uh investment in human capital like a lot of education and training because you know people are gonna why would you bother training someone so much if they've got a good chance of dying in their teens or particularly if they get tuberculosis in their early 20s um what happens of course is so many people die um and of course men would die slightly more often they'd be out working they'd be in in, farm machinery get nicks and cuts and bug bites and ticks and all that kind of stuff. Plus, of course, they'd be in the military. So it creates a lot of dependent widows and orphans. And long-term economic planning becomes pretty sketchy.
[26:04] So there's something called health adjusted life expectancy or HAL. And that's the number of years that you live in good health. And that's important to sort of get an understanding of. So now about 8% of your life, you're not going to live in good health in general, right? But back in the day, it was about 17%. And so if you've got a health adjusted life expectancy of less than 20 years, it's not that good for economic growth, to put it mildly.
[26:40] Now, in gross numbers, slave trade was enormous, and of course it brought millions of people into Rome and Italy, and it was, in fact, one of the main reasons why the empire expanded was because they wanted to go get themselves a tasty number of new slaves. The big difference, of course, and we'll sort of circle back to this later, the big difference was that they were all Europeans. The slaves that were brought in were almost all Europeans, and they've done genetic tests of people in graveyards, and like of a hundred or a thousand people, they found only a couple of people who weren't Europeans. So they did expand, but the slaves that were brought back into Rome and Italy, were almost all European.
[27:21] And there is a estimate of population density 13.6 inhabitants per square kilometer compared to uk now has 254.7 so quite a lot um and if you really want to get to the concentrated sort of sinkholes of mortality in the roman empire yes you just head to a city even with all the uh the plumbing and so on, and the aqueducts, the fresh water and so on, still fairly pre-modern sanitary conditions.
[27:51] Urban regions, you just died like flies. More local deaths than births, so you had to have constant immigration, you see? You may notice this similarity elsewhere in the modern. When you start to get population decline, rather than change the policies in government, which are producing that decline, politicians say, well, we don't have enough people in the country. We're looking at a future demographic decline. Let's bring in lots of people from way across the ocean, way across the sea in questionably compatible and from questionably compatible cultures. And the same thing, of course, occurred to some degree with Rome, although it did happen a little later on. So that's just a big picture of how big the picture was in Rome as a whole. You know, just let's give an example here. So in top left here, we've got Britain. Not the UK back then. It's Britain. So let's say you were a Roman bureaucrat in Britain and somebody sent you a message and said, hey, you've just been reassigned to Syria. Go to Syria because, you know, we want to round out your experience. Okay. To make this journey from Britain to Syria, six months.
[29:03] Six months to traverse the empire. Amazing. All right, so, okay, Roman Empire not totally unique, which is why we need to talk about it more, because of how it fell was relatively unique. In the Old World, four classical empires which arose from 200 to 100 BC.
[29:22] Han China, I don't think that was the original name for Harrison Ford's character, Han China, Mauryan India, Parthian, sorry, Parthian Persia, and of course the Roman Empire. Each empire was formed. How did they do it? They united at least two widely disparate geographical regions. The Romans originate in a small town in Italy. They conquered the Western Basin and then the Eastern Basin of the Mediterranean. Now, everybody needs to say this who talks about the fall of Rome. We're really talking about the fall of Western Rome. The Eastern Roman Empire was split in two for ease of bureaucratic management, and the Eastern Roman Empire based in Constantinople lasted almost a thousand more years than the Western Roman Empire, but we're just basically going to talk about the West.
[30:11] So for all these ancient empires, it was force that brought the regions together.
[30:15] Boom, we've conquered you, you're ours, we own you. But what is it that keeps them together? Well, essential institutions held them together, and that allowed the armies to move on to new territories, right? If you conquer something, got to leave your army there to constantly whack them all down, which we sort of saw happening with the US-led invasion of Iraq. People have got to like what's happening after you conquer them, because then you can't release your army to go to new places and get new people. So let me just give you a little tiny thought experiment here. Let's say that space aliens, they come down, and they conquer your country. And it's bloodless, right? There's no giant death rays. There's not War of the Worlds and so on. There's not, you know, Tom Cruise's perfect hair being parted by more lasers than it generally is, I suppose. But let's say that space aliens conquered your country and they ended wars and they cut your taxes 90%. Ooh, do I have your attention yet? That's right. I'm going to call in our tentacle brethren to come down and save us. So let's say space aliens come, shrink the size of your state enormously. There's no more civil war, no more war. They cut your taxes 90% and they double your lifespan.
[31:34] Well, it's got my attention because, you know, it would be nice to live to 180 or whatever, right? So think of that. Would you be nostalgic and say, boy, I really wish we could get back those civil wars, massively high taxation, and boy, it would be fantastic if I could just die in my regular lifespan rather than live for twice the length. So this is important to understand. This is why it kind of worked for a lot of people in the Roman Empire. And of course, there's a classic and great scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian, where they go, oh, what have the Romans ever done for us? They get through all the lists of everything the Romans have done. And it's well worth checking out on YouTube. It's a brilliant film all around.
[32:13] Um so this is really important especially when it comes to the mediterranean like the mediterranean the wealth of that basin rises and falls largely based on sea trade right because roads and it was just terrible you know go go if you anywhere near i guess you can go into the algonquin trail or whatever and just try going off the trail it's like oh man you know what a bear grills nightmare of thwackery i mean i did this when i was uh after i left high school um i, worked up north in Canada as a gold panner and prospector and so on for, I guess, all told about a year and a half. And a lot of it was like hacking your way through bush and picking leeches off your nutsack in like deep swamp water and stuff like that. So it was, well, it's nice to get some action though. So it is brutal. And so sea was the way to go. But of course, where you get the sea, you get the pirates. And so the fact that Rome cleaned out piracy was important as well, because there had been seaborne commercial empires throughout the Mediterranean for well over 2,000 years before Romans' domination.
[33:18] So, Rome, of course, worked hard to keep the sea free of pirates, so the merchants and the people who wanted to buy and sell stuff from other countries and cultures loved the Romans. They built enormous harbors, which, you know, were really helpful for trade. They built lighthouses, so you're not going to crash into the ocean and so on, and that's, you know, pretty important stuff. So, the essential sea trade, which also, of course, helped them move their armies around. This is one of the main reasons they built the roads, which we'll get to. The Romans dug canals. They dredged giant ship channels. They built river ports and maintained the security of the shipping lanes through these enormous river fleets. And systems of roads and bridges brought all of this infrastructure together, and some of these roads and bridges have continued to be used into modern times. They built things to last.
[34:09] Now, all of this, as I've mentioned, not really very advanced technology. The Romans were really good at organizing and really, really bad at that kind of innovation. How was all of this done? Well, in, I mean, there's the Army Corps of Engineers. Good job, New Orleans. But in America or in the West, there's the army, which is like, boom, it's out there doing its stuff. But the Roman army was very different. The Roman army was used in combat only about 10% of the times. And that was when things were really bad and really fighty. Only used in combat about 10% of the time. Most of the time, the soldiers were used to build all of this famous, amazing Roman infrastructure. So this kept the population happy because it's like, hey, we've been conquered by these really bad guys. Hey, I don't have cholera because I've got fresh water. Oh, isn't that nice? My children are surviving because there's, you know, decent infrastructure in the town. And so it kept the population happy that the army would to build all this cool stuff, and it reduced the cost of the army, because now it can move more quickly. So if you've got these great roads, and you get the army from one place to another faster than anyone else, you need fewer people in the army because it's more mobile.
[35:18] And this is the stuff that, you know, people loved about being in the Roman Empire. Well-developed written laws. Uniform currency. Weights and measures were uniform, you know, a lot easier to trade if everybody's using the same weights and measures. Hadrian's Wall, protection from bloodthirsty savages and so on. And the utility of the army in building and maintaining stuff. The army would build brick factories. They manufactured tiles. They created lead and iron smelters and stuff like that. And it was generally a 25-year enlistment. I think it was about 20, at least in Canada, until you can start pulling your pension. But you would be enlisted for 25 years if you joined up. Sometimes it was voluntary. And they'd try and keep you in your hometown. And they would really work hard to educate and indoctrinate you in Roman values, right? So if you were part of the Roman army, they spent a lot of time, not sort of full metal jacket style trying to get you to really understand Rome and to be Rome and to transmit those values. Now there were of course lots of armies kept on the outskirts of the empire but they weren't primarily to keep people out which was somewhat impossible but just to sort of control their movement.
[36:36] There was in Rome strict religious toleration as well as there was emperor worship. And interestingly enough, when the emperor worship began to fall away, this is sort of one of the arguments as to the effects of Christianity, because Christianity would consider it bad, if not downright blasphemous, to worship the emperor. That came later with the divine right of kings in the Middle Ages, but there was emperor worship. When that began to fall away, a lot of the values also began to fall away. Now, Rome was converted from a republic into an empire in about 14 BC by Augustus Caesar. Of course, he said that he was maintaining the republic. Ah, a politician who destroys values while claiming to protect them. Good thing that only happened in antiquity. Now, this was a big problem in Rome as a whole. Now, it's considered to be a cause. I don't view it that way, and we'll sort of talk about why, but it was a problem. The Romans were not able to create a stable system of succession. Who's the next person in power? The Greeks were able to achieve this, the Romans weren't, and so there was, of course, every time an emperor died, and for a while they seemed to be dying pretty regularly, not really of natural causes, there was this giant power disruption, struggle for power, and that created a big load of problems.
[37:55] The relationship between Rome and the areas outside of Rome, particularly in the Germanic areas, there's a lot of trade moving back and forth of these sort of frontier zones. And a lot of pretty major Germanic tribes and people settled just on the other side of the frontier, where they could get some secure relations, enjoy some security for the Romans beyond the border.
[38:15] The towns of those Romans beyond the border were perhaps more Roman even than Rome itself. And so at least some of the Germanic people who lived more or less peacefully along the frontier, and they did respect and recognize Roman ways and attempted to emulate them. So it wasn't just this mad hatred of Rome that caused the eventual overrunning from the barbarians, which we'll get to in a sec.
[38:43] Now, Roman Empire, always vulnerable to attack. You know, the bigger you get, the more borders you have to protect. And in the Danubrime northern border that was particularly vulnerable. Since the time of Julius Caesar, the Roman army was regularly clashing with the northern barbarians. As I mentioned, some emperors tried to buy them off. Some said, hey, come in and settle on Roman lands, join the army. And they said they never became truly Roman. You've got to massage that stuff into the brain early on. They did not integrate, retain much of their original cultures. And again, when the empire is doing relatively well, everybody gets along. When it starts to run out of resources, boom, it become in-group preferences, the other becomes the enemy, and you just get a lot of fractious stuff going on.
[39:30] Now, the Germanic tribes called the Goths, they didn't actually want to attack the empire, they wanted to join it. I mean, you got to understand, and this is true for the West, and people who look outside into the West, they're living in like terrible shanty towns, and it's like Disney World in the West. They want to get in. They want to participate in the great wealth of the empire, the trade opportunities, the stability, the civilization aspect, the peace in particular. So they wanted to get into the empire because they merely wanted, and this was the phrase actually used at the time in ancient Rome, they just wanted a better life. Now, there were a lot of people, of course, pushing to get into the empire. But it didn't seem to pose a huge threat at the time. But as these disparate tribes and ethnicities and religions and cultures spread into Roman territory, they did not assimilate, and that caused a huge number of problems. Now.
[40:31] If you want to join the Roman Empire because you can make a lot of money there, then what you're doing is you want to join it for the money, not for the values that create the money or create the capacity to make money, not for the free trade, not for the low taxes, not for the small government, not for all of the things that helped Rome become wealthy. You come for the money, not for the values that create the money. And that is a very, very different thing. Now, there was, and this is true, of course, of what's going on in Europe as well, there was a pull because they wanted to get the wealth. And of course, economic migrants from the Middle East can make dozens of times on welfare what they could make at home in Europe. So there's the attraction of all of the wealth that's available, but there's a push. And these two things have to come together usually to create mass human migration. So the push from the Middle East for some of the countries, of course, is the collapse. Thanks, Hillary. Collapse of a lot of their somewhat brutal but stable nations beforehand, you know, Libya and Syria and Iraq and so on.
[41:31] But the Goths at the time were fleeing this god-awful menace from the east, the Huns. And the Huns were pretty brutal. And so they were really getting squished up between the Huns. They just desperately wanted to get into Rome, into the Roman Empire to gain security and safety from the crazy, violent Huns. And this is, you know, ISIS in the Middle East pushing people to some degree. Think of the drug cartels and the the corruption and so on. Drug gans, to some degree, pushing Hispanics north into America. Think, of course, of the war on drugs, you know, bombs a lot of, or sprays a lot of the Mexican farmland, which means the farmers can't compete. Also, there's a lot of dumping of food into the Third World and into Mexico, which means the farmers can't compete. They've got to go somewhere.
[42:19] So, yeah, barbarians. As Roman values really began to decay, there were a lot of people who thought the barbarians were better. And the letters of, he was a Christian named Salvanius, he said, the selfishness and corruption of the ruling classes is really terrible, and, quote, considered the barbarians to be without question their moral superiors.
[42:44] And as you see the decadence of the late empire, I guess, of the west end of Rome, it is an understandable perspective.
[42:53] So, if sort of counter-tribalism or fractious tribalism was the problem, where did it start? Well, Rome was originally composed of three separate tribes, the Ramnes, the Titus, and the Luceres, and each of them was subdivided into about ten, they were all called clans or curies. The institutions of the Republic, as well as the hierarchy of its army, mirrored these tribal and curial divisions, right? So, you have an ethnicity and a tribal structure that has been around forever, and then your society mirrors that tribal structure. When other people with different tribal structures move in, what happens? And this tribal essence persisted at least throughout the Republic. Now, tribal societies are actually kind of stable. They're self-regulating or self-governing. They rely on things like ostracism, which, you know, if you can get the women to ostracize somebody who's doing bad or doing wrong, then you get gene death, right? So you end up with genes for conformity to the tribes. So they're kind of stagnant, but they're surprisingly stable.
[44:02] And this was true among the Greeks, right? So liberty has sort of, in the modern West and to some degree in ancient Rome, liberty began to mean licentiousness. I can do whatever I choose. I can do whatever I please and so on. But among the Greeks, liberty meant self-government, not permissiveness, not I can do what I want, but you are free if you govern yourselves. The Greeks called themselves free because they governed themselves. They considered the Persians to be slaves because the Persians were governed by an autocrat.
[44:31] Self-government required and requires great discipline and cultural patterns and values that ensure the subordination of the apparent interests of the individual to those of the family and of the society as a whole. And I can hear all the objectivists, you know, bringing up their ninja blades of the virtue of selfishness. And we can have that discussion another time and simply pointing out that we all need discipline to live. And we don't want to confuse freedom with licentiousness. Freedom has a lot to do with discipline and the subordination of your personal interest to those of the family. We all understand that, Ian, if you get your kids, you can't go out drinking every night and stuff like that. So the institution in tribal groups is sort of the council of elders and so on, and they interpret and socially enforce tribal traditions and ensure that these tribal traditions are accurately transmitted to succeeding generations. This imprinting is really, really important. And this did not last. So the virtues practiced by the classical Roman writers were very similar to the self-governing values of tribal societies. And these subdivisions, as we talked about a couple of bullet points up.
[45:45] They lasted pretty well until the reforms of King Servius – this is like Cleisthenes in Athens – he established geographical divisions to replace tribal ones as the basic administrative units of the state. So rather than organizing people by tribes, it was just like, bing, bing, bing, geography. And this is very similar to the giant clusterfract mess that was created by Western intervention in the Middle East, where they would carve up all of these countries really based upon geographical or administrative requirements or preferences, rather than actually mirroring the tribes at the time. The same thing happened with the partition in the post-Second World War period in India and Pakistan, as something called Churchill's Hiccup, I think it's called, where they just did not allow or recognize the degree to which tribes tend to work relatively well within their own geographical regions. But if you jam a bunch of tribes in and overlap, Czechoslovakia is one of the big problems with Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. And one of the reasons it was so weak was it was so a Balkanization, the Balkans, right? And you see how all of this stuff doesn't work.
[46:49] So Enius, a famous guy, of course, attributed Rome's greatness to three, count them three things. Number one, divine favor. Okay, well, that has a lot to do with demographics and particular ethics. But the steadfastness and discipline of the Romans. And finally, the third was their moral character. So I'm not going to try and do the Roman, but the Latin rather. It goes something like this. The Roman state stands firm on its ancient customs and on its men or heroes. So he doesn't say anything about the Roman state, the republic, the voting or anything like that. He says, Rome, the Roman state stands firm on its ancient customs and on its men or heroes. So I guess he realized that the political manifestation, the political forms don't matter much. What matters is the spirit of the people.
[47:42] And so foreign influences were to some degree that first domino, first course of the changes which began to overcome and undermine Roman society.
[47:53] So the cultural patterns, these values that are just netted deep in, and if you've talked to people from radically different cultures, things that you take for granted, well, we're into freedom of speech, and they say, well, freedom of speech is blasphemy, or freedom of speech is bad, or freedom of speech is disunity, or whatever it is, right? Try to have those debates. You're not going to get very far. These things need to be netted into people very, very early. And one of the great challenges of Western thought is we think that reason and evidence is going to change everyone's mind doesn't really seem to happen very well. Except for this show and you helping by sharing all of this information and this presentation.
[48:30] So, the cultural pattern creates these various institutions, and then these institutions grant citizenships to people who don't have those cultural patterns. And, you know, Greece and barbarians and all these other things where they began to hand out citizenship like candy because they wanted more taxpayers. Boy, I just feel like I'm stuck in a revolving door with frescoes and iPads. But these sort of powerful and unfamiliar foreign influences really begin to undermine and fragment the manifestation of earlier values. The state doesn't create society. The state is created by society. And when those society values change and fragment, you get huge problems with the state. So let's turn to the economy. The economy of ancient Rome. Ooh, you're going to be a big hit at your next dinner party. All right.
[49:19] The ancient Greek and Egyptian civilizations abandoned their free market principles. And again, we're talking free market with slavery and other problems, but in general, relative to where they ended up, it was much more free.
[49:33] So ancient Greek and Egyptian civilization said, oh, enough of this free trade stuff. Who needs it? We're going to pursue policies of crushingly high taxation and massive central planning, socialism, bureaucracy, command and control economy. And as an added bonus for not economic growth, let's also pursue endless war. And then you get piracy that closes the sea trade because all of your military might is consumed in this endless war and so on. And that's not good. And one of the big differences at some points in the empire between Egypt and, of course, Rome, Egypt was the personal property of the Roman emperor, but Egypt largely retained its socialist, economic system, central planning, command and control, diktats, price controls, you know, the usual crap. And this was a huge problem. One of the reasons Rome were basically such jerks to the Egyptians and did not really invite them to participate in Roman free trade and Roman wealth, was that it was, Egypt was the main source of Rome's grain supply. And this became all the more important, it was essential for Rome's survival to get a regular access to this grain.
[50:50] And this became 58 BC and onwards they started the welfare state of grain, the grain fare state, where they'd hand out free grain to the Roman citizens and so on. So that became even more important to get that steady supply of grain. And at this point, they'd lost a lot of free market principles and didn't trust it to happen that way.
[51:08] So this is a main reason why Rome expanded so easily was that it had a free market for the most part. And the same thing was true of England in the 18th and 19th century. You get a free market. I've made this case a million times before. You get a free market, you get a lot of wealth, and then the government starts scooping up that wealth and using it for its own benefit. The historian Oertel wrote in 1934, quote, The victory of Augustus and of the West meant a repulse of the tendencies towards state capitalism and state socialism, which might have come to fruition had Anthony and Cleopatra been victorious, right? So in that war, if the central planning of Egypt had spread to Rome, it would have been a disaster, and it didn't spread the other way because Rome was the—sorry, Egypt was like the basket case for the Roman grain. So merchants, in general, thirst for stability. You cannot do much if there's war, and you cannot do much if there's piracy and all that. And they said, okay, this succession problem is horrible in Rome, so we're going to try and centralize or concentrate political power in one man.
[52:19] Octavian took the name Augustus and became the first emperor of Rome, ruling from 27 BC to 14 AD. Now, this did shrink some political freedom. You know, he's an emperor, but it did lead to an expansion of economic freedom. So Augustus did favor private enterprise, private property, and free trade. So that's good for merchants, at least, and for the general population who care more about bread than votes. So under Augustus, taxes were lowered significantly. He abolished tax farming, which was this practice of just saying to people, go get me a bunch of taxes, And if you can't get them, you have to pay me anyway. And he regulated taxation as a whole. So...
[53:01] Trump-ish, could be made the case. When there was this relative peace, it revived trade and commerce, and it helped by all these Roman investments in good roads and harbors and so on. So, when there's predictability, then you get expansions of trade, and you get expansions of all these kinds of good economic benefits. Regime uncertainty, which is happening in America, and it's happening in Europe as well, because people don't know what's going to happen with immigration.
[53:29] People don't know what's going to happen with taxation. They don't know what's going to happen culturally. Is the right wing going to get in? Is the left wing going to continue importing migrants and so on? Nobody knows. If you look at the difference between what Hillary Clinton's going to do versus what Donald Trump's going to do, or at least what they say, people are going to hold off investing or creating jobs or starting businesses until they find out which way the wind is blowing. So this is, I mean, amazing. Just think about this. Except for tiny customs duties, estimated at about 5% customs duties, free trade ruled throughout the empire. Free trade ruled throughout the empire. I bet you they didn't need 5,000 pages of fine print TPP stuff or NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement. Tiny customs duties. So again, this is similar to certain aspects of the early US economy, the early American economy after the revolution.
[54:19] Michael rostovs has described this as a period of quote almost complete freedom for trade and of splendid opportunities for private initiative and um this is one of the reasons why earlier given said this was uh some of the best places uh to live ever two days a year pay your taxes five percent on customs duties which means locally produced goods there's no tax no duties no nothing at all and it's just astounding.
[54:45] All right. Ah, the elephant in the room. Slave. Slavery. So, Rome expanded largely from a political standpoint to take slaves. So, the conquest of Carthage, Macedonia, and Greece in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC brought so many slaves into the empire, it turned slave labor, which used to be a luxury and privilege for the ruling elites, into a pretty predominant factor determining both social and economic policies for the entire republic. So, this is really, really important. The mass importation of slaves during this period at first seemed beneficial, but later destabilized the fragile Roman class system. So it's not obviously directly comparable, but it's not wildly not comparable. Think of H-1B visas in America, immigrants, and outsourcing. Um so um you import people that the local people can't compete with right so h1b visas are driving down significantly opportunities for technologists or or engineers and so on in america particularly in the computer science field because you can't compete because you can pay these people very little they can't leave their jobs they can't compete um you don't have to sort of bid with other people for their labor and so immigrants as well mass importation of people that the local population can't compete with.
[56:05] Or at least it's very hard. Let's just make it not quite as absolute. It's very hard to compete with. And this is, of course, one of the reasons why Trump is interesting to a lot of people. He's going to try and control the importation of low-rent, low-wage people, and give some opportunities for the local population to have jobs. So when you stop bringing in all these slaves, it becomes a big problem for the laborers who want to compete with them and then you end up with more of a welfare state which we'll sort of get into in a minute or two and um, The price for a male slave in Rome at the time of Augustus has been quoted at 500 denarii. A female could go for as much as 6,000 denarii because male privilege. So 1 AD, year 1 AD, slave population in Rome. So let's just about 900,000 total inhabitants. It went to a million a little later.
[57:01] How many or how much of that population were slaves? Well, between 300,000 and 350,000, and that's, you know, a lot, you know, a third to a little more than a third of the people are slaves. Now, outlying provinces and so on, the numbers go down, dropping to about 2% and 10% of the total, and that is a big problem, because with the mass importation of slaves, price of labor went down, and you can't compete with free, so a lot of unemployment. And if you're a citizen farmer and you can't compete with all the slave labor, right? I mean, then you have a big problem. You end up leaving your farm, going to the city and living on welfare, which means that you're no longer passing down your hard work values, your get up early, milk the cows, hoe the back 40, mend the fence. You know, I don't know what the hell goes on on farms, thankfully, but you're not passing along that discipline and you think of the welfare state in the West and in particular in America, some minorities and of course whites as well you've had two or three generations where nobody has a job.
[58:02] And all of that human capital, all of that discipline, all of that knowledge about how to make money, how to deal with conflicts, how to work with your boss, how to please customers, all gone. And it's really hard to resurrect that stuff.
[58:14] So you got a lot of unemployed people in the city, and that's a lot of social unrest unless you give them bread and circuses, right? You give them cheap entertainment, and you give them bread. At one time, the emperor was importing grain. In Rome alone, he had to import enough grain to feed 100,000 people a day.
[58:37] And they were a burden on the state. And what did they have to do with their time? Well, not much, except cause trouble and contribute to an ever-increasing crime rate. Huh. Now, that's got to be just a coincidence. and um and this is an argument oh man i took so many history books up when i was working as a sort of gold panner and prospector and one of them was said well basically there was no industrial revolution because there was slavery, Why would you want to invent labor-saving devices when you've already invested in labor? If you invent labor-saving devices, then the value of your slaves go down. So the people who've got the most money have the least incentive to invest in labor-saving devices. And of course, the whole point is that the machines have to produce things more effectively and efficiently than people.
[59:24] And so slavery was a, that was the curse, right? So you do the evil of slavery. It was not considered evil at the time, of course, but you do the evil of slavery. And the curse is that you don't get an industrial revolution because during the last 400 years of the empire scientific achievements of the romans what did they do they organized public services well and they were good engineers i mean the roads bridges aqueducts fantastic um and of course like all late empires um they built uh medicine free medicine for the poor and so on but human and animal labor were so, I mean, the livestock of slaves and the livestock of animals were so prevalent, but they didn't invent many new machines. They didn't find new technology. They didn't figure out how to produce goods more efficiently. And as the population grew, they could not provide enough goods. Slave labor is pretty inefficient relative to what's going on with machinery, right? I mean, at the turn of the last century, 70, 80% of Americans were involved in farming. Now it's down to like 2 or 3% and much more food is being produced because they've switched to machinery and technology.
[1:00:34] So they couldn't produce enough goods and food for their growing population because of the curse of slave labor. I mean, they knew about water wheels, they knew about windmills, but very few of them were actually used in this period. And this is really crazy until you understand the effect of slave labor. So they didn't have any real industry, not much agricultural machinery, and so they were really reliant upon labor. And then when the labor began to diminish, because they couldn't conquer more lands and get more slaves, and because people vanished out of the system as taxes went up, they just really started to run out of stuff.
[1:01:14] And yeah, they just watched the entire economy collapse, at least the rich Romans, rather than, I don't know, retool your farms to become more productive. So farms originally were run by small business families. It's the middle class, right? The ballast, the stability of society. So these farms throughout Italy were soon absorbed and replaced by massive slave-run plantations owned by the aristocratic elite, right? Because they can afford all the slaves. You can't compete with slave labor. And so you end up selling to them, moving to the city and living on welfare. And this is also similar to outsourcing, right? Where the jobs all go overseas and then people end up on welfare. Now, of course, the jobs, if there was no welfare, the jobs would be much less likely to go overseas because people would reduce their wages or benefits to the point where they would be able to work locally. But because there's welfare, there's a point below which people simply won't work for money because it's more economically productive for them to go on welfare. So welfare drives all of this stuff overseas. And that, of course, happened with Rome as well, not overseas, but to other areas. So by the end of, you know, these sort of endless wars and general social disorder, the Roman slave population was at least equal to that of freemen, non-citizens, 25 to 40% of the population of Rome. And again, prevented this industrial revolution as a whole. I think it's a good case to be made.
[1:02:35] All right. Monetary policy. Oh, this is the meat of the matter. This is the marrow and the bone of the good stuff. So money, money, money. It's at the heart of any empire or country.
[1:02:45] So, fiscal policy, political power, military power, and what's called democracy all hinge on money. I mean, we just watch the RNC and the DNC, and the DNC in particular, my goodness, the Democrats are just promising people free stuff. Well, that means that they have to have the money for it. Fiscal policy, political power, military power, can you pay for your military? Well, these all hinge on money.
[1:03:10] So all governments all throughout the world always inexorably seek to monopolize control over money in their territories. They want to be able to create and print and control the money because that way they get to inflate, they get to borrow, they get to do all of this crazy stuff to pretend that they have more money than they have, at least in the short run. Now, when a government gets control of a currency, it seems to benefit people in the short run. It's like, you know, cocaine. Hey, I'm happy. But that's only a side effect of the central goal of giving the illusion of gifts, right? So, if the government says, I'm going to give you $1,000, and then it has to tax you $1,500 to give you the $1,000, it's very clear that it's a bad deal. But if they say, I'm going to give you $1,000, and they tax you only $250, and they use that $250 as collateral to borrow $1,000, then you, you know, you give them $250, they give you $1,000. You think, wow, we're wealthier, except for the debt thing. Or they can use it to dilute the currency, to print money and so on, or in this case, to dilute the high-value content of the money, the gold and the silver. So it's bad stuff. So there was one emperor, Septimus Severus. It does sound like something out of Battlestar Galactica, doesn't it? Gave this advice to his two sons, Catacalla and Gaeta. He said, live in harmony, enrich the troops, ignore everyone else.
[1:04:29] The state is a fist they didn't listen so well one brother killed the other and spent so much on the military that his mother begged him to slow down you know when your mom's saying you're spending too much and your mom's very rich it's not a good situation, so the son raised military pay by 50% and doubled the inheritance tax, and then he made almost everyone who lived in the empire a citizen because that way you could tax them more right he said, there was no more money to be pillaged from the population but not to worry quote for as long as we have this he snarled pointing his sword we shall not run short of money and uh yeah it uh it devolved from a um a mafia with good pr to just a plain old mafia later on in the empire.
[1:05:18] And so this expansion of citizenship right what do they have left to sell when they can't bribe you with your own money when there's so much debt and so much devaluation of the currency that the government can't bribe you with your own money. What do they have to sell? Well, they have citizenship to sell. And we can see this happening all over the West at the moment. So you used to be a citizen because you had the same values. And then citizenship just became a means of expanding the tax base. Bring people in, especially when the birth rate begins to decline, right? So when the birth rate begins to decline, what happens is governments say, well, we need more people, right? We got old people retiring. We need money from young people to pay for the retirement of the old people that aren't enough young people.
[1:05:59] But the problem is, it takes a long time to grow people into taxpayers, like a quarter century or more. So governments can't sit there and say, well, to deal with our fiscal crunch, to deal with not having enough money to pay off all the unmet promises and unfunded liabilities and obligations to the old people, we're just going to encourage childbirth. Because what happens is, when children get born, they're a huge liability to society. They cost a lot of money, you've got to put them in schools, they need health care, and so on. A quarter century later, maybe, or more, they'll start producing taxes, but it's much easier for people to just, hey, let's import some taxpayers. Boom. Other countries have paid for them being kids. We just get the rewards of them being taxpayers. Of course, the problem is generally you end up paying more in social services and welfare than you collect in taxes, but it's still more than if people were having kids. It also takes moms out of the workforce if they want to be good moms, so you can't even tax them. So it's bad all around. It's just a huge drain. And so expanding citizenship is the best way for governments who are way underfunded to get money rather than having the domestic population have kids. So that's pretty important.
[1:07:11] And Roman coins, you know, were so stable for a while, at least, and so popular, you can actually find them all the way out to India. They've been found all the way out to India. That's how far they went. Um now 167 bc right before christ the republic had enriched itself enormously through a series of conquests um they found silver or created silver and gold mines in spain that were a huge source of revenue for the state you know just as spain later did it in south and central america which imported so much gold and drove so much inflation in spain uh in the 16th century that it destroyed the Spanish economy for 400 years is brutal. Um, and so, um.
[1:07:55] What happened was a larger tax base through the provinces, the people who were given citizenship in the provinces, and by this time, Rome didn't even need to levy taxes against its citizens in Italy, looked only to the provinces to collect the taxes to pay for all of the good stuff. Taxes were raised to pay for deficit government spending, food for all in society, the welfare estate, government-sponsored activities and diversions such as circuses and sports. And I'm guessing the Olympics, I don't know if they were going on in Rome, but they certainly had good old naked javelin tosses. And hey, who hasn't had that dream once in a while? Actually, pretty much every night. But so, monetary policy, very important. Basic coin of the empire was a silver denarius, worst name for the punk band you could imagine, which was at least originally 95% silver. Within the span of 100 years, it dropped to 50% silver. Why? Because you can create almost twice as many coins with 50% silver as opposed to 95%. By the middle of the 3rd century AD, the denarius had a silver content of just 5%, so almost a 20 times devaluation. And the denarius was like the total backbone of the Roman economy.
[1:09:12] So it was not very common for you to get paid in gold because a day's wage for an average laborer was like one denarius and so it was the backbone of the economy is what most people used and therefore it was the most abused by the roman authorities and by the third century all the emperors were soldiers and all of them came to their power they got hold of political power by a military coup of one kind or another.
[1:09:40] So, the empire had begun hiring soldiers recruited from the unemployed city mobs, or even worse, from foreign countries. And this is pretty important. The armies that you get from, you know, and you lower the standards and bring in people who are not part of your own cultural history and have Roman values netted into their brain from an early age, well, they're not very reliable. On the other hand, they are very expensive. And so, they had to keep raising taxes. They had to keep devaluing the currency because they had to keep paying these um barbarians now the barbarians you know were pretty smart and they figured it out pretty quickly that they were getting crap coins the denarius was basically turning into yak dung and so they said okay forget this if you want to pay us rome you got to pay us in gold we're not taking the stinky denarius at all and um well let's just say the roman emperors had a pretty strong incentive to pay the troops well. One Roman emperor refused to pay what's called a donative on his accession, and this was a bonus, a cash bonus given to the soldiers when he got into power. So he didn't pay this bonus, and he was just killed by his troops. So there was a little bit more than an angry letter from Visa.
[1:11:01] And so, yeah, the soldiers who didn't get paid were a challenge to the succession planning. And so what did they do? Well, they raised taxes. They debased, they borrowed. And sometimes what they do, and this became common later in the empire, is they just say, hey, you, relatively rich guy, you're a traitor. I heard you plotting something. I'm going to go and take your estate and sell it so that I can pay the troops. And given that the emperor's had a little bit more to fear from the troops than from some elderly middle-class guy who's trying to hang on to his villa, well, they always pick on the nicest people or the least dangerous people in order to bribe the most dangerous people, which is also going on these days as well. So bad stuff.
[1:11:46] So the third century was called the age of the Barak emperors. So over the next century, it's not funny, but I mean, it's a little funny, I guess it's not too soon, but 26 emperors over the next century, only one of them died a natural death. So coinage continued to be debased to pay for the state. Between 258 and 275 AD, prices rose in most parts of the empire by almost 1,000 percent, right? So you've got more coins flooding the market because they've been debased and prices go through the roof. Inflation means inflation of the money supply. The actual price rise, which most people call inflation, that's just the effect of having so many coins.
[1:12:27] And if you have doubled the coins and not doubled the goods. So goods stay the same, if the coinage doubles, then the price of everything goes up by double, right? So the only people who were getting paid in gold were the barbarian troops hired by the empress, because he was terrified of them.
[1:12:41] And the Emperor Constantine started taxing the estates of the senators as well as the capital of the merchants. And he said, no, no, no, you cannot use the denarius because we know it's crap. We made it crap. You've got to pay us in gold. We won't accept anything else. Now, taxing the capital of the merchants is pretty bad too, because it's your savings, right? If you get taxed on your savings, then you're going to want to spend rather than save, which means there's less money available for investments and improvements and all that. Again, feeding the present to star of the future. So cities started creating their own currencies to pay their bills. And the governments, this is amazing, the government started rejecting their own coins. And they said, you know what? I know we're in charge of the denarius. I know we've created it. I know that we've crapped it up, but we're not taking it anymore because we've messed it up so much. So you got to give us payment in kind or straight on gold. That's it. Payment in kind or gold. And so people who could not afford the gold payments, where were they going to get it? I mean, they have to pay for gold with denarius or something. Then the denarius is worth nothing. So of course, gold price is crazy when it comes to denarius. They just abandoned their lands. Woo! I'm going to go. I could either struggle to keep this farm going as my taxes go up and break the back of my entire lineage, or I can go and watch people get torn apart by lions in the Colosseum and eat free bread all day long and cause trouble and stuff. Well, you know, I think I'm going to go there.
[1:14:08] So here is a graphic, the cliff ride of hell itself. Hey, see if you can figure out when the government started bribing the poor. So this is the silver value of the denarius from 300 BC to 400 AD. And as you can see along the top, you know, a couple of hundred years, pretty stable. I think it's the British pound sterling has been the most long lasting currency, even though it's gone down enormously in value at about 400 years, the value of the U.S. Dollar has crashed by about 98% since the foundation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, so a little over 100 years. But here you can see silver value of denarius. Oh, it's doing well, it's doing well. And this is logarithmic, right? You see, we're going way down here. It's crazy. So this is even steeper if you were to map it out properly.
[1:15:00] So...
[1:15:02] This is a really, really tough time for the Romans. Again, 113-year stretch, 192-305 AD, 84% of the emperors were either brutally murdered or assassinated in some other way. Pretty, pretty bad stuff. There was a crisis in the 3rd century from 235-284 AD. We've got invasion, we've got civil war, plague, economic depression, and it looked like the whole thing was about to go into the toilet. And this crisis occurred at the same time that the silver denarius went from having 2.7 grams of silver to basically nothing. It was silver in name only. So they just started squirting base metal like bronze and copper into the silver coins to base the currency like hell. And by the year 300 AD, silver denarius, or its equivalent, had only a trace of silver left. So as currencies devalue. As inflation hits and currencies devalue and debt escalates, there's lots of social upheaval. And this tends to feed itself, right? So as you debase the currency, you destroy the economy. As you destroy the economy, you need the welfare state because you're afraid of revolution. Because you have the welfare state and you don't have the taxes to pay for it because the economy is being destroyed, what do you have to do? Hey, you got to devalue the currency to pay for all of the welfare state. Oh, that means that the economy gets further destroyed, which puts more people on the welfare system, you get how this works. It's pretty brutal as a whole. So that's the silver value of the denarius, 300 BC to 400 AD.
[1:16:31] This, I argue, is at the foundation of a lot of these problems. A lot of the problems are a reflection of this, because if you can't devalue the denarius, you actually have to start telling the truth to the people about what you could afford and what you can't afford. But this is a cocaine-addicted fantasy. Third century fiscal crisis, as we just talked about, decline in silver content of the Roman coin. So you see here, 64 to 68, right? Boom! 90%, 90% crashes down, crashes down. In 100 years, it goes to virtually nothing. And this escalates the problems. If they weren't allowed, like Bitcoin style or whatever, they weren't allowed to do all of this crap, then they'd actually have to make better decisions than all these bad decisions they make by thinking they have this infinite magic money photocopying machine. Governments get worse and worse as soon as they gain control over the currency, which every politician thirsts for, but they just start making worse and worse decisions, you know, like, say, going to war in Iraq without raising taxes. Anyway.
[1:17:37] So, this hyperinflation created a huge amount of economic chaos, and as we talked about, 1st century BC, about a million inhabitants in Rome, and until the end of the 2nd century AD, it was about the same. And then it began to collapse. Slowly throughout the 3rd century, and in the 4th, it really collapsed. By the 5th century, out of the million people, only 50,000 people were left in Rome. So let's just say I'm guessing there was a bit of a housing crash and they had some elbow room. Hey, finally got a seat in the Colosseum.
[1:18:15] Oh, look, the barbarians are pouring over the walls. Anyway, so this is crazy. So again, first century, Denarius 90% silver, end of the second century, down to less than 70%. One century later, less than 5%. By 350 AD, here's the number. I mean, you can't even say this stuff with a straight face. all but worthless an exchange rate of 4 million 600 000 the denarius to a gold solidus or nearly 9 million to the original aureus and sorry i keep forgot to mention the sources we're going to put all of the sources um for all i'm saying below so yeah i mean it's crazy yeah i mean it was just them. And you can't make any plans. You can't, long-term interest rates, who knows, investments, you can't, everybody gets paralyzed.
[1:19:10] Just for comparison, 1913, Foundation of the Federal Reserve. This comes from the USinflationcalculator.com. Value of $1 Federal Reserve note, 1913 dollars. Hey, let's go back here too. Boom, boom. Yeah, government gets control of the money. Boom! And it just catastrophically goes down in value. This is why I'm saying we really got to start pushing back against this stuff, folks, because we all know where it ends.
[1:19:39] So here's the frustrating thing, is that continually debasing the currency doesn't even help the government's finances. So there's something called Gresham's Law, not about bad novels. This is bad money drives out good. So everybody knew that the older money was worth more. So when the government comes and says, hey, come pay your taxes, what they do is everybody hoards the older coins and pays the tax bill in the newest junkie stuff, which is why the government stopped accepting it in the first place. So this debasement, the government's real revenues, in other words, the actual amount of silver or economic value they were getting from taxes may actually have fallen as a result of all of these debasings.
[1:20:20] So, again, they didn't want to raise taxes in ordinary Romans because that's an admission that they're doing bad things. But what they did was they just handed out citizenship like candy. We don't care what your values are. Here's some citizenship because we want to get more people in the tax net. And they put the usual rabble-rousing rhetoric of we're going to make the rich pay their fair share, as we saw in Hillary Clinton's speech. Boom! Inheritances and the freeing of slaves were heavily taxed. And that just means you tax inheritance, people just spend rather than save. And taxing the freeing of slaves was really bad, because the one chance the empire might have had, given the technology of the time, was to find some way to transfer labor from slaves to wage laborers, because then you have an incentive to create labor-saving devices. You might have hit the tipping point to an industrial revolution, but no happening.
[1:21:12] And so, as the private wealth of the empire was taxed and confiscated and seized, or maybe it was hidden or just went to other locations, economic growth slowed virtually to a standstill. And then, of course, once the wealthy were taxed to the hilt, then they gave up or left, and then the government spending had gone up, and the poor and middle classes had to start paying the state's bills. As the middle classes got out of the paying taxes business, as you see a lot of people leaving the workforce in America, boom, the tax burden falls on the lower classes. So everyone says, oh, we'll get the rich to pay. It's like, nope, you're going to end up paying. It's just the way it works.
[1:21:51] And Rostov says, the historian said, quote, the heavier the pressure of the state on the upper classes, the more intolerable became the condition of the lower. People weren't creating jobs and so on. Now, the Cato Institute, that's a free market think tank, says that emperors very consciously and deliberately taxed like crazy the senatorial or ruling class in order to render it powerless so it wasn't a competitor for their own power. To do this, you needed to create the imperial guard, these enforcers, and so on, and this was a huge problem.
[1:22:28] So, economic growth collapses because of excessive taxation, and the burden falls onto the lower classes. In the 3rd century AD, the money economy almost completely broke down. But the military demands of the state remained high.
[1:22:46] Rome's borders, of course, under continual pressure from the Germanic tribes in the north and from the Persians in the east. Now, the emperor's power and position now, the Baric emperors, depended almost entirely upon the support of the army. And the army had to be paid. You couldn't avoid paying the army, regardless of the consequences to the free market. Now, this is to some degree still the case, but with posse comitatus, it's less of a risk for the US president. But now it's the welfare recipients that has to be paid. Otherwise, there's going to be riots and all that. So this is crazy. And there was a strong ethic began to be created against the ruling classes, against the emperors and so on. St. Tacitus said, quote, it is no use trying to escape their arrogance by submission or good behavior. Robbers of the world having by universal plunder exhausted the land, their drive is greed. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious. If poor, they lust for domination. Neither rule of the East nor West can satisfy them. Alone among men, they crave with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To plunder, slaughter, seize with false pretenses, they give the lying name Empire. And where nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace.
[1:24:10] But enough about U.S. foreign policy. What happened to economic freedom? Well, of course, economic freedom has to do with predictability, not just property rights. And we're going to touch on inflation again because it really went crazy. Diocletian's time, the year 301, the price of denarii, fixed at 50,000 for one pound of gold. Only 10 years later, it had risen to 120,000 for a pound of gold. In 324, this is only 23 years after it was 50,000, it was now 300,000. In 337, the year of Constantine's death, a pound of gold bought 20 million denarii. Inflation destroyed the economic freedom of the Romans. Because, as we mentioned earlier, except during war, Rome originally was generally a free market.
[1:24:59] And the decourions were the prosperous small and middle landowning class. They were very important in cities. They became the municipal councils, magistrates, and officials. And they were very benevolent. They did this because they thought it was a good thing to do. They liked being positive, you know, like the Elks and other groups that get together and, you know, do nice stuff, the Shriners and so on. They would build stadiums. They would build bathhouses. They repaired the streets and they provided the pure water. And this was benefactions, philanthropic, and the reward was, you know, public recognition and esteem. You know, like most people, they will do almost anything you ask them to and almost nothing you tell them to. And so this, you know, relatively free labor was really, really important in creating a just and peaceful society, particularly in the cities. They viewed state services an honor. they would donate time and money to general improvements. You know, put your name on the hospital wing kind of thing. Now, in the middle of the third century AD, all of this free, benevolent labor kind of went by the wayside. The Decurians were now charged with collecting taxes and they had to make up anything that they were required to pay. If they couldn't collect it, they had to make up the difference from their own pockets. So what did they do? They abandoned their posts and vanished. They just would take their savings and go elsewhere, to put it mildly.
[1:26:28] Now, merchants, again, the government stopped taking its own money to pay taxes. They had to pay in goods or pay services in kind. So what that means is if you have a factory for making garments, now you had to deliver a certain amount of garments to the government requisitions. If you had a ship fleet or even just one ship, you had to carry a certain amount of government goods and you have a kind of quasi-nationalization of private enterprise. And by the 3rd century, nearly every Roman denarius that was collected in taxes was going into the military and administrative maintenance. And now the state was just heading straight towards bankruptcy.
[1:27:12] And what happened as well is as more wealth began to shift towards the poorer classes, to tax the rich and subsidize the poor, the sort of intellectual life began to be kind of debased, lowest common denominator, and so on. And again, this is back to Rostov, the most conspicuous feature in the development of the ancient world, especially during the imperial age, was that less intelligent people generally started to drown out more intelligent people. You tax the rich, the rich tend to be more intelligent. You're taxing the rich and subsidizing the poor. it creates a kind of dysgenics that's really hard to um uh to survive.
[1:27:51] So people began to abandon their professions. You couldn't pay in silver, you couldn't afford gold, and you got tired of the government coming, taking all the stuff you were making. So what happened? Well, the usual crap in an unenlightened population that, oh, people are abandoning their professions because of bad government policies and hyperinflation. So let's have worse government policies. So laws began to be passed compelling people to stay in their professions. These laws were then made hereditary because, you know, it's a dry run for Atlas Shrugged. And then taxes were fixed regardless of productivity. And that's harsh for farmers because farmers have good years and they have bad years. And if you're not paying a percentage of your wealth, but rather fixed taxes, you have very little incentive to stay on as a farmer. Long-term mortgages and loans vanished because nobody knew what the value of money was going to be in the future. So what happened was a two-tier monetary system developed. So politicians and soldiers and bureaucrats, they were all paid in gold and they enjoyed a gold standard. Everyone else scrabbled with a debased currency. It's like now in central banking, when the Fed creates a bunch of money, those who get that money first get to spend it at the current value. Everyone else who gets it later gets to spend it at vastly diminished value. So there's that double standard that goes on in the West at the moment.
[1:29:07] And again, we talked about originally Romans only had to work two days a year to pay their taxes. Now, towards the end, the empire was just viewed as absolutely abysmal and tyrannical. The end of the empire, for a lot of people, the farmers, the peasants, the businessmen, they said, thank God it's gone. What a nightmare. You know, like the end of the Soviet empire, particularly for the Eastern Bloc countries, it was like, whew, fantastic, because it was literally strangling the economic life and survivability of the population. And they were just, they viewed its end as a relief. And of course, if people hate the state, they won't work to defend it. So in France, the early 5th century Christian priest, Salvia of Marseille, wrote that the Roman state was collapsing because it deserved to collapse, because it had abandoned the first premise of good government, which is justice to the people.
[1:30:04] A historian writes, by justice he meant a just system of taxation. Salvia tells us, and I don't think he's exaggerating, that one of the reasons why the Roman state collapsed in the 5th century was that the Roman people, the mass of the population, had but one wish after being captured by the barbarians to never again fall under the rule of the Roman bureaucracy. Now, the laws controlling and demanding that people stay in their professions started in the defense-oriented industries, like delivering armor, and delivering swords and so on, sandals or military sandals. And it started there and then it spread out because, of course, you know, you've got to deliver food, so you've got to do the food, you've got to deliver water, so you've got to do the water and ships, you know, everything spread out that way. And that's, of course, because you had to please the military at all times. Now, this is sort of just an interesting sidebar, but this word barbarian, It could be argued that the word barbarian has a modern equivalent.
[1:31:13] So, those who wanted independence from the Roman Empire, those who didn't want to be dominated by the Roman Empire, they were all called barbarians, you know, Calgacus and people like that. And what they did was they used unconventional warfare to oppose the most powerful military in the world. So if you want to be free of the domination of foreign influences and you're willing to use unconventional warfare to achieve your goal, and when there's a lot of sympathy for your goal, it could be argued that the modern word for barbarian is terrorist.
[1:31:53] And that is it's an interesting perspective I'm not saying it's all necessarily true but it is a very interesting perspective to think of and, barbarians the terrorists are kind of judo right they use the strengths of their enemies right so when it came time to invade or to go sack Rome the barbarians used all of the Roman technology all of the Roman roads, the bridges and all that, they used it. And of course, when it came time to strike at the American oligarchy, they used American inventions on 9-11, the airplanes and so on, to strike at all of this. And the same thing when there's cyber attacks and so on. So this is a way of looking at it that is important, that when the empire becomes unjust, the amount of resentment against the empire begins to increase. We can see this happening in Europe as the amount of resentment against Angela Merkel and other countries' leaders that are pursuing policies so at odds with what the majority of the population want, that there is becoming a somebody-come-and-save-us feeling. When that starts to happen, things get very challenging indeed.
[1:33:10] Let's talk about family, because that's the basic component for social stability and the transmission of values.
[1:33:21] Women, right? Roman authors often complained in the late Republic, wives, they used to play this ideal role, they don't really do it anymore. In the first century BCE and the first century CE, divorce became increasingly frequent after 200 before the common era, and it was initially, easily initiated by the husband or more often, or as it became often, the wife. Wives gained control of their own property, which they could sell or give away a bequeath as they liked. As a result, women gained power over their husbands. So by the late republic, a rich wife who could divorce and take her wealth with her had a real threat against her husband and could wield influence over him. This increasing female power manifested in escalating sexual promiscuity and adultery. And I guess the modern equivalent would be, I'm going to drag you through the family court system and that's how I'm going to have power over you. And so I'm going to be more bullying.
[1:34:20] And one historian wrote, Roman men deplored the fact that these rich women were more concerned with their own figures and luxuries than with their families. Unlike the good old-time matrons, according to the historian Tacitus around 100 CE, these modern women did not spend time with their children and did not nurse their infants, but left them to slave wet nurses. Furthermore, children were handed over to be raised by child bonders, usually the most useless slaves of the household. Now, I worked in a daycare, and there were some nice people there, but a lot of them are kind of like minimum wage people and so on. They would be the least economically productive or valuable people to have raise your children.
[1:34:59] And there's strong evidence of a steady decline in population across the entire empire from the 2nd century CE on. And by the 500s, there were only 6,000 people left in Rome by a thousand. And why this fairly drastic reduction in population occurred, well, nobody knows for sure.
[1:35:22] Though the sort of luxurious lifestyle and the fact that a lot of women became less interested in producing and raising children, certainly played some part in that.
[1:35:32] And now, my friends, we must turn to the growth of the welfare state, as history tends to be so blindingly repetitive without the kind of knowledge that we're talking about here. We have to talk about its effects. Now, of course, we talked about this late third century inflation. During this time period of the inflation, the Roman army doubled in size, and that, of course, is partly what drove the inflation. They need to pay all of the additional soldiers without conquering additional territory. But it wasn't just the Roman army, entire layers of bureaucracy grew. You know, like how we have national governments in Europe, and then we have the additional layer of the European Union, I guess, except for the United Kingdom recently. So originally, it was just like Rome, province, city, boom, one, two, three, that was it. By the time of Diocletian, 284 to 305 AD, there were four emperors, four imperial courts, four praetorian guards, four palaces, etc. Kind of a lot of overhead. And in the 300 years following Augustus, the provinces had multiplied from only 20 to 100, with no real increase in territory. So we're just subdividing stuff up. As the empire is growing, more wealth can be pillaged to feed the ruling classes. When the empire stops growing, they have to multiply themselves.
[1:36:46] It's sort of like if you just pour water on a parking lot, it just spreads out. But if you put barriers in, the water just begins to grow. That's like bureaucracy. It spreads out as long as the empire is growing. When the empire hits its limit, it starts to pile up vertically all of these bureaucratic layers. Now, in 58 BC, as we said, Rome began distributing free grain, and this brought huge numbers of the rural poor into Rome. There was, again, with ever this mass kind of movement, there's a push and there's a pull. The pull was that there was free grain. The push was the massive influx of slaves from the empire that the rural poor could not compete with. Now, by the reign of Julius Caesar, 320,000 people were on this welfare dole.
[1:37:30] Now, the expansion of the dole of the welfare state drove steep rises in Roman taxes. Because in the earliest days of the Republic, Roman taxes were mostly, it was a tax on all forms of property, land, houses, slaves, animals, money, and personal effects. The basic rate, and I'll try and say this without bursting into tears, the basic rate was 0.01%. Occasionally, it would triple catastrophically to 0.03%. And it was assessed primarily to pay the army during war. In fact, afterwards, the tax was often rebated. So you've got a 0.01% tax. Often, it would be rebated. And remember, of course, the army was doing a lot of the building of the infrastructure that made the Roman Empire so valuable to its inhabitants. Now people also freed their slaves so that the slaves could qualify for this welfare so if you had 10 slaves you freed five of them you could keep them in your house and they would be bringing free grain into your house this is why they had to put a tax on the freeing of slaves you see this is what could have happened without that tax enough slaves could have been freed that suddenly labor-saving devices become valuable as we talked about before but none of that happened.
[1:38:45] And Augustus ended the tax farming, which had often grown abusive, where you were just out there gathering taxes, you had to remit a whole bunch to Rome, no matter what you got, and he ended that. And there was, you know, just intellectually as a whole, there was an increase in mysticism and a belief in knowledge by revelation, superstition, and so on. So Charles Radding, in a book called The World Made by Men, he says that the cognitive ability or desire to compare different viewpoints or perspectives, which you can find quite often in Augustine's Confessions, had kind of disappeared by the 6th century. Because, of course, when people abandon reason and evidence, they isolate themselves within their own conceptual bubbles, because there's no way to mediate disputes between people unless we have the objective arbiter of reason and evidence. So this fostered less of a desire to cooperate. And you can see the breakdown even in the West of community. Community breaks down when the welfare state comes in because you don't need to lean on your neighbors because you're getting your resources from the state. And this isolation helps foster solipsism or the belief that your own perspectives don't need to be mediated socially. The reason we mediate our belief socially is so we can cooperate and achieve economic success that way. If the money or the grain is just flowing in from the government, we can indulge in our superstitions and mysticisms without that concomitant harm.
[1:40:13] So, under the Augustinian tax system, communities had fixed payments.
[1:40:18] So, if you made more than what you had to pay to Rome, you got to keep it all. And you didn't have to share a penny of it with Rome. So, you knew in advance the exact amount of your tax bill, and if you made more, you could keep it all. And this was a great incentive to produce and gather wealth, right? Because you get to keep 100% of the money that you make over the particular tax bill that you have. technically the way of saying it is the marginal tax rate above the tax assessment was effectively zero. And that's the opposite, of course. The more money you make in most modern societies because of the graduated income tax, the more you pay in taxes. In this case, you paid a minimum and you got to keep everything over and above that. And so that was a great incentive for people to go out and make more money.
[1:41:02] So early Rome had economically exceedingly pro-growth policies. A huge common market, the entire Mediterranean, stable currency, low taxes, a decent court system, and so on. There were limits on the court system. They couldn't actually compel people to be witnesses in civil cases and so on. But how do we know this? Well, there were more shipwrecks. There was a sharp increase in the money supply, which did not lead to inflation. Nope, no problem having an increase in the money supply as long as it's reflecting an increase in productivity. If you have an increase in the money supply without an increase in inflation, that's an indication that more goods and services are being produced. And also, early Rome had the lowest interest rates in Roman history, and that was another.
[1:41:49] Indication. The state during this early Roman period had so much income that Augustus was able to repair all the roads of Italy and Rome, restore temples, and build a lot of new temples as well as construct many aqueducts, baths, and other public buildings. This is back in the days of Roman.
[1:42:09] Efficiency. Now, the important thing with the assessment, tax assessments, is that if you made a lot more money, you could get reassessed, and that would mean you would pay more money in the future. But in the short run, it was very, very pro-growth. And the early republic, many, many more shipwrecks, and they really diminished later on, which indicates slowing of trade. So, what happened? How did the Roman Empire hit its crisis point?
[1:42:41] So, Tiberius cut back on public spending and hoarded cash, and this led to a severe currency shortage in 33 AD. Also, there was a dormant usury law. This came up fairly repetitively throughout the Middle Ages as well, that lending money at interest was considered to be a bad thing and that of course cripples economic growth when people do that. So there was a currency shortage and a dormant usury law was put into enforcement which further harmed economic growth.
[1:43:08] So there was a money shortage, and because he stopped spending on growth and infrastructure, there was sharp contraction in economic activity. What was the solution to this sharp contraction in economic activity? Well, the state made huge loans at 0% interest in order to provide liquidity. Yes, that's right. It's the ancient gold-based version of quantitative easing or just money, creation, money printing. So this is, you know, we think something like Keynesianism, where the government is supposed to spend during a recession and save during a growth period. We think this is all new. This has all been done before. Thanks, BNL. So under Claudius, 41 to 54 AD, the Roman Empire conquered Britain, and that was the last major territory. So I said, as the expansion stopped, the corruption began to grow internally. Under Trajan, 98 to 117 AD, the empire achieved its final greatest geographic expansion. And that meant that new revenue had to come from the empire itself and not from the conquering of new territories, adding new tax base that way and getting their resources.
[1:44:14] So, because they weren't conquering any new territories, they turned to this debasement.
[1:44:20] And by the reign of Claudius II, Gothicus 268 to 270 AD, the silver content of the denarius was reduced to 0.02%. debt.
[1:44:32] So just why did they have to give away free grain? Well, partly because it got so expensive during these periodic deflations. So here's a measure of Egyptian wheat sold for seven to eight drachmas in the second century, cost 120,000 drachmas, an inflation of 15,000% during the third century alone. This is unbelievable chaos in the economy. This is absolutely unsustainable in terms of economic planning, stability, or anything like that. So, the Roman economy was largely a cash economy. There wasn't a lot of credit that was available. Of course, the money was gold and silver coins. So, when the state ran a budget surplus, it caused a direct contraction in the money supply. And this is one of the main causes, as the Fed itself has admitted, of the crash in 1929 that started in America and spread throughout the world led to a 13-year depression that culminated in World War II. Kind of a bad set of decisions. Expansion of the money supply followed by a sharp contraction of the money supply creates kind of wild economic instability.
[1:45:38] So, And Diocletian, 284 to 305 AD, tried to stop inflation with, and again, this is so common, it's so repetitive. We've seen the same thing going on in Venezuela, where the government is now considering forced labor, forcing people to go work on the farms to deal with the food crisis. So when inflation is occurring as a result of the government corrupting the money supply, what do most governments want to do? Do they want to solve the problem? No. They want to play whack-a-mole with the effects of their bad decisions. So what did Diocletian do? Well, he put a far-reaching system of price controls on all services and commodities.
[1:46:16] And he believed, as governments are one to do, why are prices going up? Well, people are speculating and they're hoarding, and therefore we've got to stop them from doing that. It's not because we're debasing the currency and spreading the silver out so wide you can barely get a glint of anything silvery in the coins anymore. He said, well, it's speculation and debasement, so we're going to stop that. And so they put price controls on a wide variety of services and commodities. And what happened? Well, when you have price controls, you get shortages because people will then hoard. And maybe there's some speculation going on. And so what happened was anybody who violated these price controls got the death penalty. At this point, the death penalty in Rome was applied to, I don't know, pretty much everything that you could imagine. And so, small and cheap items would get people the death penalty if they sold them in the black market. And goods, of course, vanished from sale, as did services. People abandoned their professions and went on the dole, you know, the usual stuff. But the rise in price, of course, ended up just getting much worse. And after countless people had met their death for trading voluntarily on mutually agreed upon terms, the law was finally repealed. About this government corrupting the currency, causing inflation, followed by price controls, followed by a black market, followed by fascistic crackdowns, is another one of these grim stone wheels that keeps crushing human hopes and possibilities, which we hope to reverse through conversations like this.
[1:47:46] So, continuing the tragic story of the decline under Constantine, 308-337 AD, well, he continued Diocletian's policies, economic control, central planning, all of that god-awful Soviet-style mess that is crippling Western economies at the moment. So he even more tightly lashed and bound workers and their descendants to the land or to their occupation. So it became that you had to do what your father did, and you had to stay on the land your grandfather worked, and this, of course, was the basis for what turned into the medieval practice of serfdom. In 332, Constantine ordered, quote, Any person in whose possession a tenant that belongs to another is found, not only shall restore the aforesaid tenant to his place of origin, but also shall assume the capitation tax for this man for the time that he was with him. Tenants also who meditate flight may be bound with chains and reduced to a servile condition, so that by virtue of a servile condemnation, they shall be compelled to fulfill the duties that befit free men. We chain you should you leave your livestock enclosure of tax collection, but we're going to say that that's because you're oh so free. This is a terrible death cycle. Government controls lead to more distortions, lead to more government controls, until either they're repealed or the society craters completely.
[1:49:08] So despite some such efforts or perhaps because i would argue of such efforts the land continued to be abandoned and trade mostly collapsed people just wanted to get away from the bullying the control the fear the anxiety the sword to the throat the chains the bindings the taxes the destruction of this increasingly dangerous and destructive empire industry moved out to the provinces see back in the day it's really hard to tax people who are in the country it's relatively easy to tax people in the city, which is why people leave the city and go to the country, because they get to escape the sort of, I don't know, martial law net of economic controls that Rome had. And so this industry moving out to the provinces, we see this with a hollowing out of inner cities, and this is relatively close to what is outsourcing, where one of the reasons why.
[1:49:57] America and a lot of the West can't produce its own goods domestically, why like of apparel manufacturing in America, only 3% is done in America, well, because of regulations and controls and union laws and high taxes. America has extraordinarily high corporate taxes. And so America is Rome and the country is the outsourcing that comes from America. They're just trying to escape the regulation. So it left Rome economically kind of an empty shell. So it was still taking in taxes, taking in the grain and other goods that were produced in the provinces that had to be paid in kind, but it was producing almost nothing itself. And of course, this makes people kind of resentful. You know, when people look at particular areas where lots of people on welfare, they're like, eh, I'm not really that happy that all my taxes is going to this stuff because it doesn't really, really help.
[1:50:44] Now, the dependent mobs in Rome, the ones who were dependent on the bread and circuses provided by the government and the military-industrial complex, produced nothing, but always demanded more, leading to an increased insane tax burden on the productive citizens. Now, some historians have pointed out that, from an economic point of view, the fact that the state was massively attempting to increase and collect these taxes, well, what did the taxpayers do? Ah, the more star systems you try to grip, the more will fall through your hands, right? It's like trying to grab a soap in a rainstorm.
[1:51:19] There was more burden placed upon people just trying to avoid taxes than the actual taxes themselves. They would move, they would change occupations, they would go into the black market, they would flee the cities. And so, just having to avoid the crazy taxes became more burdensome, and people resented it more than the taxes themselves. The heavy taxes that were applied to farm output has shown that land, rent, and real wages fell during this period. And this, you know, the 1% gets richer. This was the same in Rome as well, right? So much of the economic gains over the past 20 years have accumulated to the top 1%, certainly in America. So rich people, you could get away from taxes. You could either legally or legally, illegally find ways around it. You could shuffle your assets you could bribe people to get out of their taxes. But the ordinary citizen did not have that political connected ability to avoid those taxes, and they were pretty much helpless against these increasingly brutal tax collectors.
[1:52:22] In the 50 years after Diocletian, the tax burden on Romans roughly doubled, so small farmers could no longer live on their own domestic production. And this This led to the final breakdown of the economy. As Lactantius put it, quote, the number of recipients began to exceed the number of contributors by so much that with farmers' resources exhausted by the enormous size of the requisitions, fields became deserted, and cultivated land was turned into forest. Right? As the parasites overwhelm the host, you have huge problems. So up to a third, about a third of the people in Rome at certain periods were dependent on the state for their survival. And as Mitt Romney pointed out, I think it was in 2012, it's pretty hard for Republicans to get elected because close to half of the American population rely on the state for all or significant portions of their income. So why would they vote for a shrinkage of the state?
[1:53:26] So, state revenues became too small to maintain defense. And so they cranked up more taxes, increased the sales tax from 1% to 4.5% in 444 AD.
[1:53:39] And taxpayers invested crazy amounts of time and effort and money evading taxes rather than actually doing productive work further shrinking state revenues. And taxpayers eventually evaded taxation by withdrawing from society altogether. And this is the MGTOW phenomenon. This is the tens of millions of people who are simply out of the American labor force or the labor force in the West. This is the people who graduate from college and live with their parents and play video games. They're just, and don't have, don't get married, don't have kids. This is happening in the modern world as well, which is why, at least among Europeans or whites, there is such a catastrophic decline in the birth rate. And this is also happening after 20 years of a zombie economy in Japan, where they've tried all of the same crap that the Romans tried. People are, young Japanese people are simply withdrawing from dating, from sex, from having families, from having kids. And they just withdraw from society because the way that you compel obedience to society is you have like a prize. Hey, if you obey the rules, you get income, you get a house, you get a car, you get. But if society doesn't have the dingleberries to dangle like the carrots to dangle in front of people to compel obedience or submission to social norms, people don't want to submit to social norms because it just feels humiliating rather than productive.
[1:54:59] And this is the road to serfdom. Large, powerful landowners were able to avoid or reduce taxation through legal or illegal means, and they began to organize small communities around them that relied upon their protection. Small landowners were crushed into bankruptcy by heavy taxes and they threw themselves on the mercy of the large landowners, signing their freedoms away as tenants or even becoming slaves, signing away their absolute freedom, becoming slaves because slaves, of course, were not taxed. In 368 AD, Emperor Valens declared it illegal to renounce one's liberty in order to place oneself under the protection of a powerful landlord. And we can see some parallels with this, with the IRS chasing people from America who've renounced their citizenship and if they feel it's to evade taxes, then they'll go after them anyway.
[1:55:47] So.
[1:55:49] Just talking very briefly about the borders here, so the well-disciplined Roman army had held the barbarians in particular of Germany back for many, many years. Third century AD, the Roman soldiers were pulled back from, remember we talked about the dangers of the Rhine-Danube frontier, because there was a civil war in Italy. So they were pulled back from the borders, and this of course left the Roman border wide open to attack. So the German hunters and herders from the north began to overtake Roman lands through Greece and through Gaul, which later became France. 476 AD, German General Odessa, or Odovaker, overthrew the last of the Roman emperors, Augustus Romulus. From then on, the western part of the empire was ruled by Germanic chieftains. Roads and bridges, of course, left in disrepair. Fields went fallow, left untilled. The growth of pirates and the growth of bandits made travel unsafe, and because the farming collapsed, there's no way to maintain cities in the absence of excess food production from the farms. So trade and business began to disappear, and this was fundamentally the end of Rome as it had stood.
[1:57:05] And life, you know, the death penalty for just about everything, life became perceived as more and more cheap as the rulers began to look at the masses as undifferentiated tax livestock to be milked of every last piece of blood and productivity and bone marrow, they could just to pay the increasingly foreign soldiers, you know, 10 cents more a day to avoid getting stabbed in their sleep by those self-same soldiers. So, it became unprofitable because of regulations and taxes and price controls. It became unprofitable to trade, to manufacture anything. And then people lost their motivation. You know, without motivation, it's really tough to have an economy. People respond to incentives, the basic tenet of economics. And so, when you lock families into hereditary trades and vocations, there's virtually no choice about what you do for a living.
[1:57:57] And what happens is then people begin to despair and they begin to become less fertile. Children are seen as a needless and depressing burden. Abortion and infanticide became commonplace and sometimes children were sold directly into slavery. Now, remember there are two Roman emperors near the end, right? One in Rome and one in Constantinople. They kind of broke it up for ease of management. And despite the fact that all of these economic catastrophes were occurring in the West, the two Roman emperors continued to demand that the entire empire pay the taxes they collected into a common treasury. And so, few of these taxes made their way back to the West, because they were needed to defend the state and rebuild its infrastructure. Now, the German chieftain, Odovacar, began to defy this tradition, and he said, look, if I'm taxing these lands, I'm keeping the money here. I'm not sending it off to Constantinople to be mixed in with everyone else's. Forget it.
[1:58:57] So why did the barbarians attack? Well, as we mentioned before, the Eurasian Huns invaded Europe in the late 4th century, driving the Germanic tribes to the borders of the Roman Empire. The Romans did allow some members of the Visigoth tribe to cross south of the Danube into the safety of Roman territory, but treated them very, very cruelly. According to the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, Roman officials forced these starving Goths to trade their children into slavery in exchange for dog meat, because they were so hungry. Well, that's going to cause some resentment. Mistreat those on the edges of your empire, and you will find that your borders become just a little more porous. Now some of these Goths of course have made it into Roman territory so by brutalizing these Goths the Romans fomented a dangerous foe within their own borders the calls are coming from inside the house and eventually the Goths so hard done by so badly treated they just revolted they routed a German army and killed the eastern emperor Valens during the battle of Adrianopoli in A.D. 378.
[2:00:05] Now, this was crazy shocking to the Romans, that part of their armies had been defeated by the barbarians of old people. They negotiated a shaky peace with these barbarians, but this unraveled in 410 A.D. The Goth king Alaric surged west and sacked Rome.
[2:00:23] The Germanic tribes, the Vandals and the Saxons, were able to surge across Rome's borders and occupy Britain and Spain and North Africa. See, because of most of ancient history, the Rome's military was the envy of the entire world. And during this decline, though, the makeup of the once powerful, mighty, bottomlessly competent legions began to change. They couldn't recruit enough soldiers from the Roman citizenry, so Diocletian and Constantine and emperors like that began to hire foreign mercenaries to prop up their armies. So the ranks of the Roman armies were chock-a-block with Germanic Goths and other of the so-called barbarians. And in fact, the Romans stopped using the word soldier and began to use the Latin word barbarus because there were so many of these barbarians in the Roman ranks.
[2:01:13] Now, they were fierce warriors and fought hard, but they had very little loyalty, if any, to the actual conceptual structure, moral structure of the empire. They weren't patriotic. And therefore, if you didn't pay them, they would turn on you. Of course, mercenaries tend to be loyal to the coin rather than the king or the emperor. So, this was one of the reasons why this death spiral began to occur. So, very briefly, they couldn't get enough Romans to become soldiers because taxes are so high, they're fleeing the cities, they're evading, they don't want to, and so they end up having to hire mercenaries. They have to pay those more than they would have to pay domestic soldiers because there's an efficiency, an economic efficiency in patriotism, just as there was when we saw back in the middle class, we'd do all these wonderful things in a city just for recognition, just to be nice, just to be sort of part of the cool kids in the in-club, and the in-group preference was very strong because there was a cultural.
[2:02:09] Homogeneity along those sorts of towns or cities.
[2:02:14] And so what happened was the power-hungry officers in the Roman army would just occasionally turn against their Roman employers. And many of the barbarians who tore into Italy and sacked Rome and brought down the Western Empire, well, they had earned their military prowess by serving in the Roman legions themselves. And And this is similar to how some gangs in the West have their members join the army to learn how to fight and then turn to sort of more criminal activities.
[2:02:49] There was, I sort of want to mention this because it's a fairly powerful thesis, one advanced by Edward Gibbons, which is that the decline of the empire did sort of dovetail or coincide with the spread of Christianity, which was at first opposed as a faith and as a negative faith and was the government's attempt to suppress Christianity and failed because it was the ancient world and all that. And so some people say that the new faith helped contribute to the empire's fall, but I don't really see that to be the case. I mean, if you look at the European empires that were around over the last couple of centuries up until they fell apart when Europe virtually self-destructed during the Second World War, Well, they were Christian rulers, they were Christian leaders, and they didn't have any problem with an empire.
[2:03:39] So, to me, it's more about the taxes, the economics, and the corruption of morality.
[2:03:45] The end. So in the end, Rome ran out of money, couldn't pay the army, couldn't build, couldn't maintain forts or ships, couldn't protect the frontier, and had accumulated what could in a very nice way be called unfunded liabilities. The unfunded liabilities of we owe a huge amount of money to the mercenaries. We can't pay them. Oh, look, they're coming to collect with swords. And that was pretty much it. And of course, as taxes were raised to pay for the military, fewer people wanted to be soldiers, which meant you had to hire more mercenaries, which meant that you had to raise taxes even more, which drove more people out of the economy. So this was mathematically that which cannot continue will not continue. What are the unfunded liabilities in America these days? $180 trillion on a $15 trillion GDP economy? Yeah, right. So, the invasions of the barbarians, yeah, they were a final blow, but it was a symptom of how bad the Roman state had become in the 5th century. Three centuries accumulating deterioration in the freedom and trade of Rome. And a lot of Romans actually welcomed the barbarians as saviors from the crushing tax burdens, regulations, enslavement, disasters, mess, rising crime rates, single motherhood, all that kind of mess.
[2:05:05] Now although the fall of Rome seems you know huge and tragic from a historical perspective and I think it was because it could have gone so much better, for the bulk of Roman citizens it didn't have a little it didn't have much impact on their way of life in the moment, the fall of Rome is sort of the case that I'm pursuing here fundamentally due to economic deterioration resulting from crazy high taxation inflation and hyper regulation of the market you know it's the same reason why the Soviet empire fell.
[2:05:34] Escalating taxes, you know, they crank up the taxes. This is the Laffer curve, right? The more you tax, the less money you can get, or at least it stays about the same because the more effort people put into avoiding taxes. So escalating taxes didn't actually raise additional revenues. Wealthier taxpayers just evaded those taxes. The middle class and its taxpaying capacity were slowly exterminated.
[2:05:56] So once the invaders had displaced the Roman government, they just settled into being the new rulers, you know, meet the new boss, same with the old boss. Now, they didn't have any particular incentive to pillage once they owned the actual land. Once they became the rulers, they didn't have any incentive to continue pillaging. So, what did they do? Well, they had been attracted to Rome because of peace and stability, so they attempted to reproduce that in the regions that they conquered. You know, if your citizens are happier, then you're going to get more in taxes. So, the final demise of the Roman Empire in the West, again, as we talked about in the Byzantine Empire and the eastern half continued for a long, many, many centuries past that, for a lot of Romans, it was a relief.
[2:06:42] So, it didn't have any impact on their way of life in terms of there wasn't suddenly some new language or anything like that, but it was a relief in that the infrastructure of tyranny that had grown over the past three centuries dissolved virtually overnight. In his book, When Nations Die, Jim Nelson Black says that there are three aspects of decay. There's social decay, cultural decay, and moral decay.
[2:07:04] And there's, how do you know that they're occurring? Well, there's a crisis of lawlessness, a loss of economic discipline, and rising bureaucracy. And these are all present when it comes to Rome as a whole.
[2:07:19] And the disastrous consequences of the collapse of law and order and the predictability of law and order, when there's new regulations coming out, being pumped out like crazy, when there's new laws and rules, and oh, now it's the death penalty for selling this piece of wheat a little too high. That is the collapse of law and order. And this happened in ancient Greece, right? What happened? Well, a general loss of respect for tradition and the degradation of the young, as it's been described, and the decline of quality art and entertainment and rhetoric. Conversations and disputes become very aggressive, combative, and very intolerant. And intellectuals in ancient Greece began to turn on the traditional institutions of ancient Greek or Hellenic society. And this mirrors, of course, what's happening in the modern West with Marxist-derived critical theory, patriarchy, sexism, homophobia, racism, all of this stuff. It's like everything that is traditional is bad, is evil. All of your traditions, all of your ancestors were bad and evil, and that echo continues in its black, ugly way into the current world. So when the intellectuals begin to really turn on all the traditions that produce the wealth that pays the intellectuals, you know you are not far from the end.
[2:08:39] And thinkers traditionally emerge in these kinds of decaying societies. These thinkers emerge and they say, ah, we need fundamental change. Everything needs to change. And we must give the young a voice in society. And without that, you know, it's terrible. and the means of transmitting ancient guidelines, you know, self-discipline, responsibility, honesty, courage, all the virtues that are necessary for a flourishing civilized society, the mechanisms for transmitting those break down. In particular, the family breaks down and this is how generally the young are imprinted, but the values of the society. And Greece, in its own decline, just collapsed or decayed, I guess you could say, into a pretty lawless and disreputable nation And then they were conquered by the Romans, 146 BC, because they had decayed and had become selfish and had become lazy and become ridiculously self-critical at the same time as there was these ridiculously high levels of hedonism.
[2:09:34] And they then were conquered from outside. And there's this grim cycle, which we'll talk more in just a moment. It was a very decadent and brutal society, right? The Colosseum would get so soaked with blood during the battles in there, the gladiatorial battles, that they would shovel new sand on the blood, hoping to soak it up so it wasn't too unstable for the next round of fighters. 383 AD, captive barbarians were being fed to wild animals in the Colosseum, and that is not good. In the study of the French Revolution, José Ortega y Gassé noted that, quote, order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within. And as long as Rome recognized, as we said before, that the greatness is in the morals and in the heroes, in the self-discipline. If you discipline yourself, then you don't need a big powerful state. If you look at the single mother explosion in the West, this is a lack of self-discipline, a lack of desire or will to not get pregnant until you get married. There's three things you need to do to stop being poor, to not be poor. Number one, finish high school. Number two, get and keep your first job for a year or a job for a year. And number three, don't have children before you get married. If you do all of those things, you have less than 2% chance of ending up in poverty.
[2:11:00] And if you don't have the discipline to do that, well, then the state grows because there's this sort of pathological altruism and people aren't willing to look at other people and say, well, it could be that the purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others. Instead, they want to rush in and backfill and fix everyone's mistakes and give them money no matter what, which further accelerates the decline in self-discipline. We have to self-discipline because there are disasters if we don't. And when the state rushes in to patch up those disasters and give us money and give us insurance and give us welfare and give us free housing and free education and all that, what it means is that there's no particular need for self-discipline anymore because the mistakes and the disasters don't tend to accrue to the individuals. And this hyper-regulation, you know, sounds pretty abstract. There are studies out there, and we'll link to these below, which have said that if America had stayed as regulated as it was in the post-Second World War period, the GDP in America would be over $50 trillion, not just $15 trillion. In other words, America would be more than three times wealthier. People would have an average income of like $100,000, $150,000, $200,000, and there would be no particular problem with poverty. But because the hyper-regulation came in, economic growth slowed, and that means that there's very little way to escape from this net without a significant return to moral passion and self-discipline.
[2:12:19] There are cycles, and I'm going to refer to general ideas and some more specific ideas. And the cycles are like out of nowhere, boom, some small group, kind of ignored beforehand, just explodes and grows and spreads. And this disorder, the pioneers are bursting out, and then they conquer a whole bunch of areas. And then, because they've conquered a whole bunch of areas, you get this free trade zone which really, really boosts income. And then because there is all of this age of commerce, then everybody gets rich, and then they get lazy. Right? Civilization, as the saying goes, climbs in iron shoes and sends in silk slippers.
[2:13:05] And when you have lots of money, you want to start spending the money on helping the poor, but that is not how the money was accumulated. The money was accumulated by hard work and self-discipline, and taking it from responsible people and giving it to usually less responsible people, or you could say less intelligent people, is a form of dysgenics which sows the seed of the decline of the society. There is, when societies become rich, and this is not true just of Rome, but of some of the ancient Arab empires, that there's this spread of higher education. And rather than virtue and action, there is this interminable engagement in intellectual debate. But these intellectual arguments, they rarely lead to any kind of agreement because people just take their positions, they get defensive, they get hostile, and nobody gets won over to anyone else.
[2:13:56] And it's kind of tragic. You know, way back in the day, you used to have just a very few number of elite intellectual institutions, you know, Harvard and Cambridge and Oxford and so on. And now it's like every city, every town, every block, it sometimes seems them. So through this process of debate rather than action, there tends to be an intensification of hostilities in the political realm. And of course, because the government has more money, more people want to rush in to control it, just as when the state controls religion, all the religious groups wanted to control the state to impose their version of religion on everyone else. So because the government has become so wealthy and has the power to print money, which is the most powerful and destructive ability that governments gain, everybody wants to control the government and therefore there are no compromises possible and there's a hardening and opposition of political hatreds. There is an influx of foreigners, right? Because it's a wealthy region. Rome and Greece and the West, it's wealthy, so people want to get in. And so there's an end to sort of cultural or ethnic homogeneity, which is fine until the money begins to run out and then, boom, you get all of these hostilities that are occurring. Old tribalism returns and all of this hostility happens. And so if we look at way back at Arab empires in Baghdad in the golden days of Harum al-Rashid, the Arabs were actually a minority in the capital imperial city of Istanbul.
[2:15:21] And this is in the great days or in the significant or powerful days of Ottoman rule. So Istanbul had very few descendants of Turkish conquerors in its capital.
[2:15:35] And we can just look at New York and just walk around the streets of New York and see how many descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers are around. Well, not that many. There also is a great shift in who is considered popular, in who is considered famous, in who is considered worthy of attention and this is again all over the place throughout history. The heroes of empires in seemingly terminal decline are always the same. You got your athlete, you got your singer, you got your pretty person. You got your actor. And that is always okay. What happens is it's no longer literary heroes or intellectual heroes. It's no longer military heroes. None of those iron-willed, strong-willed, genius people around. It's people who please the eye, who please the ear, who please the senses. And they make pretty sounds with their mouths. They look pretty and so on. And they have nice muscles. They're athletes and so on. And so this is a debasement of the culture and is reflective of the hedonism. People don't want examples of heroes who achieved their moral or military expertise and power through discipline and surrendering their own ego to the benefit of the tribe. What they want to see is, you know, people who are born pretty, born athletic, athletes work hard and so on, but it's not quite the same as moral excellence, and that's one thing that is pretty common throughout these kinds of things.
[2:17:00] Now, here's a quote. I put this out there for discussion. I have not figured out all of my perspectives on this. I put this out for discussion. I will put the source to this below. An increase in the influence of women in public life has often been associated with national decline. The later Romans complained that although Rome ruled the world, women ruled Rome. In the 10th century, a similar tendency was observed. In the Arab empire, the women demanding admission to the professions hitherto monopolized by men. What, wrote the contemporary historian Ibn Besan, have the professions of clerk, tax collector, or preacher to do with women? These occupations have always been limited to men alone. Many women practiced law, while others obtained posts as university professors. There was an agitation for the appointment of female judges, which, however, does not appear to have succeeded. Soon after this period, government and public order collapsed, and foreign invaders overran the country. The resulting increase in confusion and violence made it unsafe for women to move unescorted in the streets, with the result that this feminist movement collapsed.
[2:18:09] I leave you to ponder that one, and please let me know what you think in the comments. And when there's this age of affluence, right after there's this explosion and this expansion and then this commerce and then this wealth, well, the government starts scooping up the wealth and handing it out. In the Arab Empire of Baghdad, there was state assistance to the young, to the poor. They have free university, free public hospitals, and this seems to help people in the short run, but it really tends to dissolve their resolution and strength in the long run. We all want free, but free ain't usually that good for us.
[2:18:46] So it's not biological because after about close to a century of peace right from the end of the napoleonic wars in 1815 to the start of the second world or first world war sorry in 1914 there was rich aristocratic young british men and they actually moved fairly easily into the hellish life in the frontline trenches in World War I. So it's not physical. If you move from decadent culture to a more rigorous culture, you'll adjust pretty quickly. When you have a lot of wealth and power, you get lazy. And interestingly enough, people don't tend to be happier. Women's happiness over the past 40 or 50 years has declined enormously, particularly in America. As they've had more choices, more opportunities, their happiness tends to decline, and this has happened to other groups as well. There's pessimism, there's frivolity, there's hedonism, there's materialism, and there is a decline of religion. And that is pretty significant. Unless there's a good substitute like philosophy, declines in religion tend to be declines in virtue.
[2:19:53] And what happens is there's this sort of, it's like amber slowly floating over or flowing over a ancient insect, you know. People, they really don't rouse themselves to save their own civilizations, even when the dangers are completely obvious, because I'm not sure they really feel that anything is worth saving at this point. And it seems to run at about 10 generations. 10 generations takes us from these sort of hardy, hard-working, clear-the-land-no-matter-what enterprising pioneers into the lazy couch-surfing dependence of the welfare state.
[2:20:29] It takes about 10 generations to go from that, and we can see this repeated over and over throughout history.
[2:20:39] So, there are principles. This is sort of my final speech. Thank you so much for having the patience to go through this. I hope it's been helpful and interesting. And if you find us, of course, please donate, freedomain.com slash donate to help us continue to do this kind of work and share and like and subscribe, you know, all of the good stuff.
[2:20:56] So, people grow to greatness because they follow rational principles. Equality, rationality, empiricism, free trade. And these, it's not people who are the livestock. It's not people who are the productive aspects of society. It's these principles. We have to work to recognize it's these principles that we must work to grow and extend and expand. And that, of course, is the entire point of philosophy. And when you have a welfare state, you have a giant vacuum of demand that comes in. People want to rush to fill in and take advantage of that welfare state. So one government program called the welfare state leads to inevitably another government program called walls or defense and so on. And the welfare state leads to increased military requirements, increased policing and so on, because you get people pouring in who don't want to come for the values. They want to come for the money that the values have produced. So what happens is you get the welfare state, which is very expensive. That stimulates demand for people to come into your country or into your culture, which means you've got to build walls, you've got to have enforcement, you've got to push people out, you've got to bust them, you've got to police them, you've got to round them up. So you get this ever-escalating sense of cost in society as well. Of course, massive immigration also depresses wages. That's very well understood, which means with the welfare state plus depressed wages, fewer people want to work, which means your tax base shrinks because they don't want to work, they want to go on the welfare state. The tax base shrinks at the same time as your expenses are going through the roof.
[2:22:19] Because the government has the unique ability to enter into intergenerational contracts, in particular in the modern age. You think of the municipal-issued bonds, and there are some around the world, there are 75 years in the future. Well, what politician wouldn't want to spend money now? And like two and a half generations from now, oh, somebody's going to have to pay maybe if they're still around. So freedom produces wealth, and then the state scoops up that excess wealth, uses it as collateral to borrow against the future, thus ensuring the decline. Universalism. Ah, very complex, and I'll just mention this briefly. Universalism, the idea that the values are equally applicable to everyone at all times, is a great challenge, and I have yet to see how this translates into reality. And I say this as somebody who hugely values universalism, and I've worked my whole big thesis on ethics. It's called Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, Reason and Evidence, How to Be Good with Neither Gods Nor Governments, and Why and What It Means. That's available for free at freedomain.com slash free. I strongly urge you to have a listen or have a read. But does universalism work? Does it work?
[2:23:26] Look at the empires that were conquered by the West. How are they doing now? Have they absorbed all the values of the West? Have they continued along those lines? Not really. America, we could say, theoretically, with some decent intentions, went in and tried to replace the tyranny of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq with a free, equal, and peaceful democracy, did it take? Well, no. I mean, it's been a complete disaster. It's a government program called Bringing Freedom, and what it did was create and bring ISIS. But does it really work? Can we communicate through reason and evidence and transfer values that way? I remain doubtful, and I've got a whole presentation called The Death of Reason on some reasons as to why that occurs. I'm not saying I know what the solution is. I'm just saying this idea that universalism will just tell them about all these values and they'll all be just like us, doesn't seem to work.
[2:24:16] So we are going to be free or we are going to collapse. I'm telling you this is a basic historical fact. There is not one exception throughout history, not one regime, not one empire that has continued restricting the freedoms of its citizens, particularly their economic freedoms, which has not collapsed. And as we see the escalating growth and power of the state in the West, increasing layers of bureaucracy, increasing layers of regulation, increasing complexities of taxes, and price controls, which are going on fairly regularly. And one form of price control is a minimum wage and all these sorts of disasters are occurring. So once we accept this, that we either become free or we collapse, then we have one job, which is to promote and extend freedom through peaceful and rational means as best we can. And the last thing that I want to say is that.
[2:25:05] People complain, I mentioned this at the beginning, people complain, they say, well, nobody learns anything from history. Well, it's like because nobody tells the truth about history. Nobody tells the truth about what happened in Rome and why it fell. Because if they did tell the truth about what happened in Rome and why it fell, we would have to shrink the size and power of the state in the here and now. And hey, don't you notice that government teachers, both in the government run and regulated and controlled primary schools and high schools and so on, government teachers don't really to tell you the truth about how to shrink the size and power of the state as a whole? Of course not. It's a conflict of interest. In universities, which are state-sponsored, state-protected, state-controlled, state-subsidized, you find that a lot of teachers are on the left and don't want to talk about limiting government power. Of course not, because the government is a source of their wealth and authority to a large degree. And so you're simply not going to get the truth about history from people inside the system that are feeding off state power. The parasite does not want to teach you how to detach it from the host, because that's become its job, which is to continue to suck the brain and blood and bone marrow and money and future and children from the host. So you're not going to get the truth about history from government institutions and from government-protected, privileged classes like academics.
[2:26:17] So what has happened is the history of the West in particular, the glories, the triumphs, and the disasters, the full span, the Shakespearean span of Western history has been replaced by vituperative calumny and nagging. Your ancestors were bad. Your ancestors were mean. They were sexist. They were patriarchs. They were racist. They were homophobes. They were bad, bad, bad. Colonialism was just terrible, terrible, terrible. They slaughtered all the natives and all right.
[2:26:47] It is a form of spine-destroying verbal abuse that is continually poured into the ear of the young in the West, that you have nothing to be proud of, your history has nothing, to be proud of, and that you are the descendants of immoral, destructive, violent, homicidal, genocidal, evil people. That is an inexcusable assault on the values and virtues and possibilities of the young.
[2:27:20] The truth is that the West has bought by far the greatest values to the world, the values of science, the values of reason, the values of the free market, the values of modern medicine, the values of capitalism. It's not that only the West had these, but the West did the most in promulgating and extending these values. Philosophy as a whole is to a large degree a Western tradition, at least empirical, syllogistical, Socratic, method-based philosophy. So, if you come from the West, there are a lot of heroes in your ancestry. Your ancestors brought great goods to the world. And you've heard about the evils, and they're there, but you need to hear about the goods. They brought great goods to the world. You are the offspring and the descendants of many heroes, of many brave souls, who fought very hard to bring and extend the freedoms you now enjoy. If you feel that you are descended from evil, you have nothing in your civilization to defend.
[2:28:37] You are children of heroes, and only heroes get to keep their freedoms.
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