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The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced
"The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt."
- Cicero, 55 BC
People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.
"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."
"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."
- Cicero, 55 BC
Totally bogus quote. Cicero never said that.
"Assistance to foreign lands?"
By assistance the quote-faker must mean attacking, plundering, and high taxation, with the spoils and wealth shipped back to Rome. Money never went the other way.
People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."
People were on public assistance because they could not compete against the slave labor employed by the upper classes. High middle class taxes and slave labor forced smaller landowners to sell out to Senatorial families. Displaced and with no options they, and hired laborers, then moved to the city until the money ran out. This was the Roman mob - placated with bread and circuses. Rome collapsed before the barbarians because nobody - slaves & peasants - had any interest or or motivation to protect the status quo and it's robber baron upper classes.
Proposals to deny citizenship and rights to those born in America, unless a parent is also a citizen, will result in a similar disenfranchised class of people. It's better to provide for illegal kids education and give them a stake in the system.
Yeah! Those Romans sure knew how to run things. We should do as the Romans did!
The Roman Empire died right alongside their currency. Oh well, just another coincidence right?
Let's look at some other cases, shall we?
Roman Empire - Slow dilution of currency until eventual fall of empire
Weimar Germany - Die Fuhrer
Hungary - Ushered in ruthless communist regime for 40 years
Late 1700s France - French revolution
Zimbabwe - Gun grab and Mugabe as dictator. Who knows what's next?
If I were a high ranking government member, I'd be s***ing bricks right now, considering how history is leveraged WAY against me in terms of my survival.
The pattern of hyperinflation is the same. Price controls. Anyone violating these price controls gets jail time. The penalty becomes increasingly savage to the point of torture and/or capital offense. Paid citizen informants (Emmanuel?) to ensure merchants do not perform "back alley transactions". Eventually, nearly everything in the country is rationed.
There will always be a saggy among the naysayers opining with "it's different this time". Hopefully, like in many cases in history, they will be the first in line for citizen justice.
Quote:
Take all those people on welfare and turn them into slaves. That would solve all our problems.
Cicero was a flip-flopper and changed his political positions with the winds. It’s noteworthy that Rome often had a problem of goods arriving with goods and leaving largely empty, that is, Rome also had the problem of having a huge trade deficit. That Cicero does not mention trade is most telling. Latifundium comes to mind too.
A trade deficit leads to higher unemployment. Higher unemployment leads to a high government deficit (and monetary action in modern times). In short, Cicero misses the (causal) key variable. If you want to go after the government deficit, you should attack the trade deficit directly. If your name is Cicero, Obama or Boehner, you make the same mistakes, just different from the ones that Cicero refers to.
The Roman Empire died right alongside their currency. Oh well, just another coincidence right?
Let's look at some other cases, shall we?
Roman Empire - Slow dilution of currency until eventual fall of empire
Weimar Germany - Die Fuhrer
Hungary - Ushered in ruthless communist regime for 40 years
Late 1700s France - French revolution
Zimbabwe - Gun grab and Mugabe as dictator. Who knows what's next?
Well we now know that at least one of our members hasn't even learned the history of the last 3,000 years, much less learned its lessons.
Rome fell due to currency devaluation???
Hungary ushered in a communist regime - like Soviet tanks had nothing to do with it.
The French Revolution???, Weimar Germany??? A few words of explanation please.
Well we have learned that 'greed' hasn't changed much no matter who is doing it.
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