[snip] The US repeats the fate of ancient Rome [/snip]
No, it doesn't.
[snip] Situation that happened to America after the collapse of the Soviet bloc is very similar to what happened to Rome after its victory over Carthage in the Second Punic War [/snip]
No, it isn't -- although if it led to the final disposition of the former Soviet Union (destruction of the capital, sowing their fields with salt) I'd be all for it.
[snip] After the victory over a powerful rival, Rome gradually took all the territories in the East and became the sovereign master of the Mediterranean. It had got almost unlimited resources. Money, slaves, and goods came to Rome. In the framework of such a globalized economy, which was provided by the military and political domination of Rome, Italian artisans and peasants became practically useless and uncompetitive in Rome itself. Gradually they all went bankrupt and turned into an economically unclaimed plebs. [/snip]
The "republican" era of Rome was one in which a few dozen families controlled the city-state and the best skilled workforce were slaves owned by those "noble" families. By the time of the Pompeian War most of the people living in Rome were slaves.
[snip] The middle class began to disappear, and society gradually became polarized: plutocracy, bogged down in luxury, plagued by corruption vs. lumpen. For this reason, Ancient Rome from a once brilliant republic naturally degenerated into an empire and political dictatorship. [/snip]
The Roman system was not a republic, or a representational system, or even a constitutional system, it was an oligarchy run by the heads of a few hundred households from a few dozen families, and based on past practice and precedents. Augustus' rise to sole emperor status was merely the evolution of the Roman government to having a permanent, full-time executive branch. Roman citizenship was expanded, which led to less slavery, not more, and as in the past, much was foreign-born, for the hard labor, or highly valued, such as household tutors (Marcus Aurelius didn't want his children to be reliant on a slave for their literacy, and taught them himself). The middle class was always around, but expanded spectacularly during the imperial period, because their skills were worth something, and there was a much broader market for goods of all kinds.
Among the things we have and that Rome didn't have was:
- a system of general public education
- a banking system (everything was private lending, basically similar to medieval/renaissance Italy)
- a postal system (had to find someone going in the general direction who was willing to carry a letter and reliable enough to see it got delivered)
- until Diocletian, an orderly system of succession
It only became more representative after the end of the so-called republic.
[snip] After the collapse of the communist system, the US became the world hegemon, who did not have any enemies at all, they controlled the entire globe. Money streamed down, and America simply bathed in wealth and began to live beyond its means. Work no longer made sense, all production began to be carried out in the poor countries of Southeast Asia, America consumed almost twice as much as it produced. The whole poor world began to work in the States, and everyone was forced to transfer the earned money to American assets. [/snip]
I'd love to live in that America. We control the globe? Really? That's an amazing claim, incredible in fact -- as in, not credible. We control China? We control Putin's gangland paradise? We control the dozens of predominantly Moslem states? Ridiculous.
We've been at peace with SE Asian countries since the rise of OPEC, and look how much better an idea that is.
There's an energy component to everything, and since the ascendancy of OPEC, the poor of Islamic and other undereducated states have moved to where the work is in a more familiar culture, such as Saudi Arabia (nearly a quarter of the population is guest workers), Kuwait (we all probably remember how the "Palestinian" guest workers there cheered Saddam's invasion), the UAE, Qatar, and even Iran (more recently, the Iranians were press-ganging refugees from Afghanistan and shipping them to the front lines in Syria). Lower labor costs have become more and more a factor in where stuff gets made -- although that hasn't been of benefit to the former USSR.
Guest workers have also flooded the EU; until the last 15 years or so, they wound up separate-but-equal, assimilating into the local society and polities, but also began to swamp the demographics. Turkish guest workers are most associated with Germany, north Africans with France. The later waves have sought the public dole and the "we shall overwhelm" scenario.
In the US, the Carter administration was a disaster; interest rates for fixed-term CDs and such were allowed to float, and people with disposable incomes -- including people like my parents, who were zooming on up to retirement age -- could afford to put the max into IRAs for the first time. Not long after, passbook savings accounts were deregulated, dropping from the reliable-as-the-tides 5% (with or without compounding) to the fraction of a percent that it is today. Interest rates in general fell out of bed early in the 1980s, and by 1995, with the "Contract With America" congress and their balanced federal budgets, interest charged to borrowers had remained low for some years. Greenspan's testimony and Q&A with congress, when it was still Demwit-controlled, boiled down to, the Fed is independent, you'll get the rates that we determine, and if you want rates to come down, balance your budget. Now of course he, instead of Dodd-Frank, is blamed for any number of financial troubles. I don't like either his wife or his apparent political stance, but the accusations are garbage.
The congressional workaround for federal overspending was to give the PRC Chinese a favorable trade status. Since that time the Chinese have become a rat on a wheel -- they have to maintain the favorable currency exchange rate between their own Yuan and the US dollar in order to maintain their exports and trade surplus with the US. In order to prop up the $ vs the Yuan, the Chinese buy US gov't debt, financing our own overspending. Bringing jobs back to the US may or may not be possible without considering this relationship, but the consequences of ending it would shatter the world economy.
OTOH, if the US gov't just balanced its budget and continued to pay down debt, interest rates would be unaffected, or would decline, and low interest rates for decades on end have disconnected our own economy from an important path to capital formation and business financing. What we call venture capitalists have always been around, but they've gotten a flashier reputation and risen in importance with the changes of the last 40 years or so.
China's tried to push production into even-lower wage countries in Africa, and Latin America, and failed. The Japanese had previously had a relationship with the US similar to what China has now. The only way to sell into its domestic market was to move production to cheaper countries, like the Republic of Korea, SE Asia, India, Taiwan -- and that worked fine until those countries started to skip the Japanese middlemen and sell in competitive fashion into the US market. The Chinese really want to be able to sell to their own consumers the items they are making for export. Also, the Chinese demand for energy continues to rise, and given the deeply paranoid, xenophobic character of the regime, they'll want to rely on Chinese personnel in overseas sources (as they did in Sudanese oil fields).
It would be nice if the world had an outlet -- a nominally Islamic state with a modern (that is, western) educational system, sound prospects for a buildout of modern infrastructure (transportation, energy, communication), and a plan for receiving immigrants/refugees from the many Islamic hell-holes. I'm not optimistic about the prospects for such a place, without a lot of outside influence. I'm also not optimistic about the unfettered flood of muzzie immigrants, either in the US or the EU member states (or Norway), or even, for that matter, other muzzie hell-holes.
With sufficient political will -- and prosecution, incarceration, and/or marginalization of the global warming demagogues -- the US could easily become not only energy independent, but also a net exporter of hydrocarbon fuels. A transition to all-electric passenger vehicles could easily lead to big problems, but the falling off of the windfall profits enjoyed by the various despotates of the OPEC members (just some idea, Mexico is probably at or near the top of the "most liberty" OPEC dartboard) would lead to much worse immigration / refugee problems than exist now from the dissolution of a couple of the former Islamic pseudostates.
The basic and very shoddy arguments of the op-ed writer -- besides being invalid comparisons -- are counterfactual. He also fails to mention that the history of the Roman empire began with the conquest of Ostia sometime prior to 400 BC and effectively ended with the fall of Constantinople in AD 1453, a span of nearly 19 centuries. The silly argument that Romans only knew how to act correctly when they had the dichotomy of themselves and some kind of cardboard cutout stereotype of the Carthaginians is ancient, dating back to the grousing of some Roman piss-and-moan type, probably from one of those "noble" families that had spent the centuries of the "Roman Republic" enriching themselves and enslaving everyone else.
