Analysis of The Fall of Rome; Modern Parallels by Stefan Molyneux

Why did Rome fall?

Overview



Political Correctness is an attack on any knowledge that would serve to curb state power

State power grows and grows

Rome didn't sucumb to war or ....


Pressure from North from Barbarians.

The barbarians kept their tribal allegiances

When money ran out

Multiculturalism

Roman currency

Latin

1 Legal system

Good builders
Pure water through aqueducts
Peace
Roads
Legal system
Courts

Worked only 2 days per year to pay taxes

Historian -

Freedom (17:14)
1. National - free from foreign domination
2. Political - Freedom to vote to choose your magistrates
3. Individual - Do what you will though you harm no others. No force or fraud against others.

These values must be taught from birth.

Different from others thought. Greeks, Africans, Germans, Egyptians.

Here are your papers. Now you're just like us

When you move a hamster from a cage to an aquarium it doesn't become a fish.

Roman culture was foundation of Rome's success

Culture is learned like learning a language.

Culture is transferred by citizenship

American Identity

America runs out of $

117 AD 5 Million KM**2

Roman women had 6 - 9 children. Hi infant mortalitiy

Population growth of 0.1%. It went up 4x. Life expectency 25 years. If you survive childhood your life expectancy was 60 yrs old.

How did people die?

Today it's chronic end of life diseases

You didn't die of old age, you died of germs,infections ex. TB.

Why didn't Rome have an Industrial Revolution?

Ancient rome knew about steam engine

Early mortality caused problems.

Health Adjusted Life Expectancy (HALE) - # of years you live in good health. Now, 8% of your life is not in good health. Back then 17%. This is not good for economic growth.

Slave Trade

• Were almost all European 

13.6 people vs 254 (UK)  pop/ km**2

Sanitation

People replacement rates were low enough that you had to have constant immigration.

Population decline

• Change gov't policies that produce the decline
• Politicians bring in people from questionably compatible cultures

Empires in General (29:00)

• China - Han
• India - Mauryan
• Persia (Iran) - Parthian
• Rome

Created by force, but institutions allow you to conquer and move on.

Space alien example.  (31:20)

• End war
• Reduce taxes by 90%
• Double your life span

What Rome did

• cleaned out the pirates
• Merchants loved the Romans
• Dug canals
• Maintained Roads and bridges
• Built things to last
• Good at organizing but bad at creating
• Army in Combat only 10% of time, most of time used to built infrastructure
• Well developed written laws
• Uniformed currency
• Weights and measures
• Army building/maintaining stuff
• Protection from savages (Hadrian's wall)
• Religious toleration

System of Succession

• Roman's not able to create stable system
• Power disruptions

Barbarians (37:00)

• Bigger you get the vulnerable you are to attack
• Regular clashes with Northern Barbarians
• Invited in, never became true Romans, no integration retained original culture
• Some people felt the Barbarians were better than the Romans at the end

When things are good everyone gets along, this can work but things go bad, resources run out, watch 

out

• in-group preferences
• fractures

Goths (39:29)

• Germanic
• Wanted to join empire
• trade opportunities
• peace in Rome
• Fleeing the Huns

Lack of assimilation caused a huge number of problems.

People joined for $ not the values that create the $.

Fall of Rome - Tribal Origins (43:06)

• 3 tribes
• society mirrors tribal structure
• Tribal structures are stable, self-regulating via ostracism
• Among Greeks "liberty" meant self-govt not permissiveness
• Tribal traditions passed to succeeding generations
• King Servius replaced geographical divisions from tribal divisions
• West did the same in the middle east
• Same happened in partition of India and Pakistan
• Czechoslovakia had problems in 1930s
• Balkans
• Aneus attributed Romes success to 3 things
• Divine favor = Demographics and ethics
• Discipline 
• Moral character
• First domino
• Freedom of Speed vs. FOS is Blasphemy
• Reason and evidence doesn't change minds
• Culture patterns create Rome
• New citizens doesn't have these patterns

Pre-Rome (49:15)

• Greek and Egypt abandoned free market principles
• Socialist
• Central planning
• command and control
• dick?? tax
• price controls
• Egypt was main supplier of grain to Rome
• 58 BC Rome had welfare state of grain
• Grain handed out to Roman citizens
• see https://fee.org/articles/poor-relief-in-ancient-rome/
• The political lesson was plain. Mass relief, once granted, created a political pressure group that no­body dared to oppose. The long-run tendency of relief was to grow and grow. The historian Rostov­tzeff explains how the process worked 
• Slaves create unemployment
• Welfare aka Dole destroys Rome
• The growing burden of the dole was obviously responsible for a great part of this chain of evils, and at least two lessons can be drawn. The first, which we meet again and again in history, is that once the dole or similar relief pro­grams are introduced, they seem almost inevitably—unless sur­rounded by the most rigid restric­tions—to get out of hand. The sec­ond lesson is that once this hap­pens, the poor become more num­erous and worse off than they were before, not only because they have lost self-reliance, but because the sources of wealth and production on which they depended for either doles or jobs are diminished or destroyed.
• Free market creates wealth
• Private property
• Private enterprise
• Free trade
• Predictibility = expansion of trade
• 
  

Slavery (54:51)

• Expanded to take slaves (3rd - 2nd Century BC)
• H1B Visas, immigrants, outsourcing
• Importing people that local people can't compete with (very hard)
• This makes Trump interesting
• 1 MM inhabitants in Rome, 33% are slaves
• Can't compete with free
• In America there are people where 2 - 3 generations where no one has a job. The following get lost and is hard to resurect
• Human capital
• Discipline
• Knowledge
• How to make $
• How to deal with conflicts
• How to work with your boss
• How to please customers
• A lot of unemployed people in the city = social unrest
• Rome gives them bread and circuses
• No industrial revolution because of slavery. Why invent devices? Value of slaves goes down.
• Last 400 years of empire they didn't create much
• Couldn't produce enough goods and food for growing population due curse of slave labor
• Knew about water wheel and other tech but relied on slave labor
• Farms went from middle class small family biz to large slave run plantations
• Couldn't compete so they move to city for welfare
• Similar to Outsourcing
• People will reduce their wages to point of welfare

Monetary Policy (1:02:36)