Each had legions at his disposal, and Rome’s terrified Senate sat on its hands waiting for the outcome.

Ultimately, the three men chose to unite their powers and rule Rome together in what became known as the Second Triumvirate. This body was established by a law named Lex Titia on this date (give or take depending on how you convert the Roman calendar) in 43 BC.

The foundation of the Second Triumvirate is of tremendous historical importance: As the group wielded dictatorial powers, it represents the final nail in the coffin in Rome’s transition from republic to malignant autocracy.

The Second Triumvirate expired after 10 years, upon which Octavian waged war on his partners once again, resulting in Mark Antony’s famed suicide with Cleopatra in 31 BC. Octavian was eventually rewarded with rich title and nearly supreme power, and he is generally regarded as Rome’s first emperor.

Things only got worse from there. Tiberius, Octavian’s successor, was a paranoid deviant with a lust for executions. He spent the last decade of his reign completely detached from Rome, living in Capri.

Following Tiberius was Caligula, infamous for his moral depravity and insanity. According to Roman historians Suetonius and Cassius Dio, Caligula would send his legions on pointless marches and turned his palace into a bordello of such repute that it inspired the 1979 porno film named for him.

Caligula was followed by Claudius, a stammering, slobbering, confused man as described by his contemporaries. Then there was Nero, who not only managed to burn down his city but was also the first emperor to debase the value of Rome’s currency.

You know the rest of the story — Romans watched their leadership and country get worse and worse.

All along the way, there were two types of people: The first group was folks that figured, “This has GOT to be the bottom; it can only get better from here.” Their patriotism was rewarded with reduced civil liberties, higher taxes, insane despots, and a polluted currency.

The other group consisted of people who looked at the warning signs and thought, “I have to get out of here.” They followed their instincts and moved on to other places where they could build their lives, survive, and prosper.

I’m raising this point because I’d like to open a debate. Some consider the latter idea of expatriating to be akin to ‘running away.’ I recall a rather impassioned comment from a reader who suggested, “leaving, i.e. running away, is certainly not the proper response.”

I find this logic to be flawed.

While the notion of staying and ‘fighting’ is a noble idea, bear in mind that there is no real enemy or force to fight. The government is a faceless bureaucracy that’s impossible attack. People who try only discredit their argument because they become marginalized as fringe lunatics.

Remember John Stack? He’s the guy who flew his airplane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas earlier this year because he had a serious philosophical disagreement over tax issues.

While his ideas may have had intellectual merit, they were immediately dismissed due to his murderous tactics.  Violence is rarely the answer, and it often has the opposite effect as intended, frequently serving to bolster support for the government instead of raising awareness of its shortcomings.

Unless/until government paramilitaries start duking it out with citizen militia groups in the streets, this is an ideological battle… and it’s an uphill battle at best.

Government controlled educational systems institutionalize us from childhood that governments are just, and that we should all subordinate ourselves to authority and to the greater good that they dictate in their sole discretion.

You’re dealing with a mob mentality, plain and simple. Do you want to waste limited resources (time, money, energy) trying to convince your neighbor that s/he should no not expect free money from the government?

You could spend a lifetime trying to change ideology and not make a dent; people have to choose for themselves to wake up, it cannot be forced upon them. And until that happens, they’re going to keep asking for more security and more control because it’s the way their values have been programmed.

When you think about it, what we call a ‘country’ is nothing more than a large concentration of people who share common values. Over time, those values adjust and evolve. Today, cultures in many countries value things like fake security, subordination, and ignorance over freedom, independence, and awareness.

When it appears more and more each day that those common values diverge from your own, all that’s left of a country are irrelevant, invisible lines on a map. I don’t find these worth fighting for.

Nobody is born with a mandatory obligation to invisible lines on a map. Our fundamental obligation is to ourselves, our families, and the people that we choose to let into our circles… not to a piece of dirt that’s controlled by mob-installed bureaucrats.

Moving away, i.e. making a calculated decision to seek greener pastures elsewhere, is not the same as ‘running away’… and I would argue that if you really want to affect change in your home country, moving away is the most effective course of action.

The government beast in your home country feeds on debt and taxes, and the best way to win is for bright, productive people to move away with their ideas, labor, and assets. This effectively starves the beast and accelerates its collapse. Then, when the smoke clears, you can move back and help rebuild a free society.

Regards,
Simon Black
Whiskey & Gunpowder

December 1, 2010

Is the Collapsing Empire and Its Police State Worth Fighting For? was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Amid the blah…blah…blah…of Bernanke’s response was this:

“The tendency of financial systems to boom and bust …is a very long-standing problem… but I think it’s very important for us to try to put out the fire…then you think about the fire code.”

In his 1988 book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter argued that all societies – like all organisms – are doomed. Tainter studied ancient Rome as well as the Mayan civilization. He noticed that problems always blaze up. Each one – whether climatic, political or economic – rings the firehall bell. And each solution – and readers may substitute the word “bailout” for solution – brings more challenges and takes more resources. Finally, the available resources are worn out.

Tainter observes that when the costs become high enough, people seem to give up. By the end of Roman era, for example, the burdens of empire were so heavy that people sold themselves into slavery to get free of them. So many people did so at one point that the authorities had to come up with another solution; they outlawed the practice. Henceforth, Roman citizens were required by law to remain free!

Another philosopher, Giambattista Vico, writing in the 18th century, put the beginning of the decline of Rome roughly at the time of the Great Fire during Nero’s reign. Nero, partly to pay for his post-fire reforms and reconstruction, began taking the gold and silver out of the coins. All civilizations go through three stages, Vico said – divine, heroic, and human. The divine period is ruled by the gods. The heroic period is adorned with victories and statues. Then, comes the human era. (Here, we permit ourselves to add a footnote to Vico’s oeuvre: the coin of the realm in early periods is the gods’ money – gold. Later, people switch to money of their own invention – the kind of money you make from trees.) This last stage, says Vico, is when popular democracy arises, along with rational thinking and what Vico delightfully calls the “barbarie della reflessione” [the barbarism of reflection]. In earlier eras, people do what their gods and leaders ask of them. In the final era, they ask, “what’s in it for me?”

Even as late as the early ‘60s, John F. Kennedy could still appeal to heroic urge without drawing a laugh. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” he said in his inaugural address, “ask what you can do for your country.”

But 11 years later, Richard Nixon, like Nero before him, began the process of debasing the country’s money. That was a solution too; the United States had spent too much. Nixon could worry about the fire code later. First he opened up with the fire hose; he defaulted on America’s promise to exchange dollars for gold at the statutory rate.

Barack Obama tried a Kennedyesque appeal to civic high-mindedness last week. We need to “insist that the first question each of us asks isn’t ‘what’s good for me’ but ‘what’s good for the country my children will inherit,’” said the president-elect. But now, like Doric columns in a trailer park, the words are ornamental, not structural. They are the homage that one age pays to a better one.

We are in the 21st century now. Barbarous reflections rise up like swamp gas. The whole place stinks of them. Bernanke and Obama offer solutions. But their plans to save the world from a correction are little more than a swindle. They offer to bail out the mistakes of one generation with trillions of dollars’ worth of debt laid onto the next.

“Regarding the current financial meltdown,” writes Rony Teitelbaum, “it is very clear that two main factors underlie the political reactions to the crisis, the first being pressure originating from ties between the financial and the political elect, manifested by taxpayer bailouts of large institutions that continue to deliver bonuses to the executives and donate to political campaigns. For those of us who are not blind, these are clear signs of political corruption which would have made the worst Roman emperor blush. The second factor is political pressure originating from the mass public. The kind of solutions offered so far, and I may add which were received with very warm enthusiasm, were tax rebates and gasoline tax holidays. These are actions aimed at a public who “impatiently expected quick and obvious results,” to quote Cary’s description of Roman society in AD300. (A History of Rome).”

Circa 2009, there is hardly a soul in the entire world who has not been corrupted by the barbarie della reflessione of the late imperial period. Both patricians and plebes are for bailouts. Both business and labor back stimulus programs. The taxpayers and the politicians who rule them are of one mind. Liberal, conservative, rich, poor, Republican, Democrat all speak with a single voice: ‘Screw the next generation!”

The golden age is over, in other words. In the space of 40 years it passed from gold, to silver, to paper…and is now somewhere between plastic and navel lint.

Regards,
Bill Bonner

October 9, 2009

After Gods, Heroes and Gold Comes the Age of Lint was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.