Historian Michael Rostovtzeff and economist Ludwig von Mises both argued that unsound economic policies played a key role in the impoverishment and decay of the Roman Empire. That just makes sense to me, how about you?

According to them, by the 2nd century AD, the Roman Empire had developed a complex market economy in which trade was relatively free. Tariffs were low and laws controlling the prices of foodstuffs and other commodities had little impact because they did not fix the prices significantly below their market levels.

After the 3rd century, however, debasement of the currency (i.e., the minting of coins with diminishing content of gold, silver, and bronze) led to inflation. The price control laws then resulted in prices that were significantly below their free-market equilibrium levels.

While currency debasement is in full swing and inflation smacks you in the face with every purchase, price controls have yet to pop up. So far, you just have to eat the inflation.

According to Rostovtzeff and Mises, artificially low prices led to the scarcity of foodstuffs, particularly in cities, whose inhabitants depended on trade to obtain them. Despite laws passed to prevent migration from the cities to the countryside, urban areas gradually became depopulated and many Roman citizens abandoned their specialized trades to practice subsistence agriculture.

With a majority of United States citizens living in urban areas, most of the population does not have the option of going back to the land. This is very different from ancient Rome.

Thousands of years ago in Rome, as well as in our recent history, we can see a pattern of tax collection that drove small-scale farmers into destitution (and onto a dole that required even more exactions upon those who could not escape taxation), or into dependency upon a landed élite exempt from taxation.

Abandoning Rome created empowerment for the lower levels of the former climax society, who escape from the burden of onerous taxes and control by exploitative elites. United States citizens seek nothing less.

So much the same, so much different. How are your subsistence agriculture skills? Do you even have a place to practice them?

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Written in 1919, the lines “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity” can be read as a paraphrase of one of the most famous passages from Percy Shelley‘s Prometheus Unbound, a book which Yeats, by his own admission, regarded from his childhood with religious awe:

The good want power, but to weep barren tears.

The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.

The wise want love, and those who love want wisdom;

And all best things are thus confused to ill.

Total Video Length: 1:48:39 in 8 segments, this is 1/8.

The film Inside Job takes a look at the financial crisis of 2008. It documents the systemic corruption of the United States by the financial services industry, and the consequences of that systemic corruption.

The first man who, having

1. fenced in a piece of land, said
2. “This is mine,” and
3. found people naive enough to believe him,

that man was the true founder of civil society.

• From how many crimes,
• wars, and
• murders, from how many
• horrors and
• misfortunes

might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows:

Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 1754

Buddha’s Example of the Burning House

Bertolt Brecht

Gautama, the Buddha, taught
The wheel of desire on which we are bound,
And bade us
Put off desire, and thus without it
Go into the Nothing that he called Nirvana,

And one day some disciples asked him:

“Master, what is it like, this Nothing?
We all wish to put off desire, as you bade us, but tell us
If this Nothing, into which we go,
Is a kind of oneness with all creation,
As if a man lay in water, limbs at ease, at midday,
Empty of thought, lay lazy in water, or sank into sleep,
Scarce knowing if someone tucked a blanket round him, so deep was he under;
Tell us if it is a pleasant thing, this Nothing, a good thing,
Or if it is simply nothingness, cold, empty, without meaning.”

The Buddha was a long time silent, then shrugged.

“There is no answer to your question.”

But in the evening when they were gone
Buddha sat under the breadfruit tree and gave to the others,
Those who had not asked, the following example:

“Once I saw flames licking the roof of a house,
And when I went to it I saw that there were men inside.
I called to them that the roof was burning.
But they were in no hurry.
One, while the fire singed his very brows,
Asked me what it was like outside, If it was raining still,
And if the wind had stopped, if there was another house nearby
And suchlike things.
I did not answer him and came away.
Truly, my friends, to the indifferent who see no need for change
Have I nothing to say.”

Thus Gautama, the Buddha.

And we too, no more concerned with the arts of patience,
Rather with the arts of impatience, of manifold means to improve man’s lot,
Teach him to lift away his worldly suffering,

We too to those, who, when any day the bombs may fall upon the cities,
Ask us what savings books and Sunday suits will be like in the new society,
To them have we little to say.

(Translated by Arnold Hinchcliffe in The New Reasoner Winter 1957-58 number 3).