The Fall Of Rome Essay

(Doesn’t our Fed do that by buying trillion of government debt?

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After the Punic wars with Carthage, Rome acquired many new lands that it did not have before.

During peace times it was easy to govern these areas but during war times it proved difficult.

The problem of succession also contributed to the fall of Rome. After the death of an emperor, generals competed with each other for power.

Once someone gained power they didn’t rule for long; someone often assassinated them.

This weakened the authority of Rome; corruption was common and law was almost non-existent.

Diocletian tried to make reforms to make the empire as strong as it was before. He also built a new capital at Byzantium, on the Bosporus. Constantine wanted a new capital that would be a Christian city, not a pagan one. People saw no need to work hard with no chance of getting ahead. To the north of the Rhine and Danube rivers, lived a group of people known as the German tribes.The president of the Foundation for Economic Education, Lawrence Reed, warned that Rome, like America, had an expanding welfare state. a man named Claudius ran for Tribune on a platform of free wheat for the masses. It was downhill from there.”Soon, to appease angry voters, emperors gave away or subsidized olive oil, salt and pork. Rome’s government, much like ours, wasn’t good at making sure subsidies flowed only to the poor, said Reed: “Anybody could line up to get these goods, which contributed to the ultimate bankruptcy of the Roman state.”As inflation increased, Rome, much like the U. under President Nixon, imposed wage and price controls.When people objected, Emperor Diocletian denounced their “greed,” saying, “Shared humanity urges us to set a limit.”Doesn’t that sound like today’s anti-capitalist politicians? Rome enforced controls with the death penalty -- and forbid people to change professions. China’s Song, Qing and Ming dynasties each lasted about 300 years.Sounds like New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg.“We have presidents of both parties legislating by executive order, saying I’m not going to enforce certain laws because I don’t like them. That open flouting of the law is dangerous because law ceases to have meaning. Tiberius established an “office of imperial pleasures,” which gathered “beautiful boys and girls from all corners of the world” so, as Tacitus put it, the emperor “could defile them.”Emperor Commodus held a show in the Colosseum at which he personally killed five hippos, two elephants, a rhinoceros and a giraffe. I object to President Obama’s 0 million dollar trip, but Nero traveled with 1,000 carriages.He realized that the empire was too large for one person to govern, he split the empire in half and took control of eastern part himself. These reforms only slowed down the process of collapse. They were herders and farmers who had migrated from Scandinavia.He then appointed a co-emperor to rule in the west. As their population grew, they began to look for new land.Merchants now charged more money because these new coins were not worth as much as the old ones.This created inflation, this problem plagued the empire until its fall.Emperor Constantine decreed that those who broke such rules “be bound with chains and reduced to servile condition.”Eventually, Rome’s empire was so large -- and people so resentful of centralized control -- that generals in outlying regions began declaring independence from Rome. We’ve lasted just 237 years so far -- sometimes behaving like a republic and sometimes an empire. At Freedom Fest, Matt Kibbe, president of the Tea Party group Freedom Works, also argued that America could soon collapse like Rome did.“The parallels are quite ominous -- the debt, the expansionist foreign policy, the arrogance of executive power taking over our country,” says Kibbe. In that time, we’ve accomplished amazing things, but we shouldn’t take our continued success for granted.