Diogenes wrote:Since this is the forum where we previously discussed the influence of Religion on civilization, I thought people might be interested in seeing this James Burke Video from his series "Connections." It tends to bolster my argument that the Christian religion has been a positive influence on the advancement of Western civilization.
edit: Also, a bit of commentary on why Rome fell, unbeknownst at the time to James Burke, also applicable to us. U.S.
One little detail left out was the communication network of the Jews. It was kicked out of Spain in 1492 and Spain declined. The Jews you see were competing with the church for money flows, communication flows, and the ear of the King.
One point made at the periphery was that the Army (which was also the Navy) was ineffective. This led to the loss of trade.
Diogenes wrote:Since this is the forum where we previously discussed the influence of Religion on civilization, I thought people might be interested in seeing this James Burke Video from his series "Connections." It tends to bolster my argument that the Christian religion has been a positive influence on the advancement of Western civilization.
edit: Also, a bit of commentary on why Rome fell, unbeknownst at the time to James Burke, also applicable to us. U.S.
One little detail left out was the communication network of the Jews. It was kicked out of Spain in 1492 and Spain declined. The Jews you see were competing with the church for money flows, communication flows, and the ear of the King.
The church is a jealous mistress.
MSimon wrote:
One point made at the periphery was that the Army (which was also the Navy) was ineffective. This led to the loss of trade.
My understanding is that a lot of the barbarian tribes learned of the tactics used by the Roman army and devised methods to counteract them. Not so difficult when Rome opened up it's borders and liberalized access to it's army by former enemy barbarians.
Rome was never that great, they were just good propagandists. A third of the people were slaves, only one or two percent lived well, the rest weren't much better off than the slaves. For all the hype about the barbarian threat, the Roman army sacked Rome far more often over pay disputes and power struggles. Then there was the Coliseum, same as a death camp only with spectators, and yet again the nutcase emperors. The barbarians get a bum rap.
Diogenes wrote:
My understanding is that a lot of the barbarian tribes learned of the tactics used by the Roman army and devised methods to counteract them. Not so difficult when Rome opened up it's borders and liberalized access to it's army by former enemy barbarians.
Actually what the barbarians learned was how the Romans stored food in silos. Once they stopped the hunger and starvation, their numbers exploded. That was the beginning of the end.
And I disagree that the Roman Empire was not a big deal. It was and is still the biggest deal in empires in all history. You can argue that the Mongols empire was larger for example, but there is almost no real comparison to be had. The Mongols did not build roads and aquaducts, nor spread literacy and commerce. The lands they conquered were relatively poor and stayed that way, where as the Roman empire at its peak was the wealthiest part of the world, made so by the Pax Romana. Truly a remarkable time and place in history. . .
Last edited by GIThruster on Sun Jul 11, 2010 5:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis
Engineers yes, but also the common folk, their leaders including politicians and especially their bean counters. It's remarkable that the empire lasted more than a thousand years, fifty full generations; the last fifth of that time under the Pax--peace that lasted as long as there has been a United States. Administration across such a vast expanse is almost the Romans greatest achievement. It was in large portion as that administration failed, because it relied upon the function of oft times untrustworthy men, that the empire eventually crumbled.
I could say lots against those days, but ranging across vast expanses with horsemen and bows and slaughtering all before you as the Mongols did, is certainly nothing like this kind of achievement.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis
Most Roman tech would be called patent infringement in this day and age, only back then they conquered you before stealing ideas. Ancient Rome had a lot in common with the Mafia. Their biggest innovation was the brute force, Xenophobia and willfulness they used to roll over and control neighbour states.
If Rome was so great, the temple in Jerusalem might still be standing, and the early writers of the Church would have had only nice things to say about the empire.
I would say Rome and China were comparable. Both established political unity over a large portion of a continent and developed administrative systems to effectively govern the entire area and foster population growth and infrastructure development.
Main difference is that China never entirely collapsed. There were a few events where it splintered, and when the northern half was conquered by barbarians, but the collapse was never complete and the empire was eventually reassembled.
This raises an issue of geography. I would agree that factors such as corruption, administrative failure, an inherently unstable political system that led to civil wars, and the growth in numbers and influence of barbarians once they were effectively Romanized were main factors in leading to the fall. However, Rome also had land borders in every direction.
In North Africa there were pre-Berbers on the border. In the east there was Persia, and eventually (after the 7th century) Muslims. In central Europe there were Germanic tribes with various Celtic remnants, Scythians/Sarmatians, and Slavs mixed in with them. There was also a massive invasion route from central Asia via the Ukrainian plain which splits into the Polish plain and the Black Sea coastal plain leading to the Danube valley. When the Huns showed up and conquered some of the eastern European Germanic kingdoms (like the Gothic kingdom in Ukraine), it set off a tidal wave of Germans to the south and west. The Huns were also able to get control of a lot of Germans and add them to their own forces; the Hunnic army was probably more Germanic than Hunnic by the mid 5th century. Attila the Hun's name is actually Gothic, not Hunnic; Atta = "father" in Gothic (Gothic had dropped the "f" and "r" found in the word in other Germanic languages) and "-ila" is a diminutive ending. "Att-ila" = "little father".
The Romans never even finished the conquest of the British isles. As a result there were always Irish (Scottas) and Picts raiding the west coast and north of Britain.
Rome essentially was always fighting a two-front, if not three-front war. When you add in the civil wars arising from corruption and succession problems, the geostrategic situation would become dicey. The Roman empire didn't have a geostrategic "safe ground" where it could restabilize from its own problems.
China, on the other hand, had its back to the Pacific ocean. The Japanese were generally quiescent, so not much ocean raiding. The Chinese could lose half their empire but regroup in the southeast and eventually re-expand.
There is a school of thought that the collapse of Rome was actually a good thing for European civilization. By setting the various local regions and city-states against each other in political, military and economic competition, it led to the rise of capitalism and to a constant search for military technological advantage. This became apparent in earnest around the 13th-14th centuries and continued until it produced the extreme nationalism of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
While this constant competition caused a great deal of death and misery, it also led European civilization to develop more quickly and spread out, leaving its imprint on the entire world. China, with its greater unity, was content with remaining in Asia, and there was little impulse to develop new technology, or at least to exploit new technologies to their logical ends. As a result China was dominated by the West for at least a century, and only in recent years has it truly gotten in on the economic/technological competition race (including doing the logical thing when playing catch-up: copying all our tech).
I'm not sure I agree entirely with this theory, but I find it an interesting perspective to discuss.
Clans organized around families and individuals who possessed stocks of food, bullion, guns and ammunition. Photo: A scene from the 1997 film, The Postman.
It was 2017. Clans were governing America.
The first clans organized around local police forces. The conservatives’ war on crime during the late 20th century and the Bush/Obama war on terror during the first decade of the 21st century had resulted in the police becoming militarized and unaccountable.
As society broke down, the police became warlords. The state police broke apart, and the officers were subsumed into the local forces of their communities. The newly formed tribes expanded to encompass the relatives and friends of the police.
The dollar had collapsed as world reserve currency in 2012 when the worsening economic depression made it clear to Washington’s creditors that the federal budget deficit was too large to be financed except by the printing of money.
I prefer to analyse the decline and fall of both Rome and Spain in terms of economics and commercial/property rights.
Rome prohibited during the empire the formation of joint stock corporations and abhorred the idea of limited liability. If a company you invested in caused harm, the Senate was more of a mind to proscribe you and everything you owned. This obviously stymied and killed off capital markets. As a result, and because slavery was perfectly legal, investment class persons invested their wealth in slaves, who acted as employees and the patriarch of the family was the sole proprietor and individually responsible for everything his slaves did. This obviously was the driver for the capital of the empire to channel into the growth of slave class as the primary assets of the aristocracy.
For those who were upwardly mobile (few and far between), the structure of the economic system typically was rigged to force the individual artisan or merchant into vesting their capital in the infrastructure of the empire. For instance, construction companys were forced by the way in which Rome paid for bridges, aqueducts, colloseums and other buildings for the state. The builder/architect received half payment upon completion of the project, and the other half in 20 years if the building was still standing. This also created a rather large barrier to entry for large projects, requiring a rather large layout of capital by the builder to pay for construction, on expectation that they would be repaid on completion, and only earn their profit two decades later (assuming the government actually would honor these obligations and that the individual had not been proscribed by one of the too frequent inter-family conflicts that was common to Roman politics.
In fact, the way that restrictions on joint stock companies forced capital to be centered on the family amplified the tone of these interfamily competitions and why the Empire tore itself apart with battles over which family's patriarch would control the empire. In the last days of the empire, the very wealthy became money lenders to smaller landholders to meet the punishing and rising tax rates meted out to pay for the burden of defending the empire, eventually forcing all the smaller land holders into serfdom when they could not pay back their debts.
Further crimping the capital markets of Rome was the Council of Nicea's decree in 325 AD prohibiting clergy from engaging in usury, which was broadly defined as interest of any kind, but which in the Canon Law was defined as interest greater than 1% per month. Later ecumenical councils extended this ban to the laity, and the dark ages resulted from a drastic prohibition of properly charging an appropriate rate on high risk and short term loans. The Dark Ages were as much caused by this death to the capital markets of the christian world as by anything else. The bans on interest prevented people from raising short term emergency capital with which to pay for defenses against barbarians.
In the late middle ages, the Jews of Europe were its bankers. In England, the departing Crusaders were joined by crowds of debtors in the massacres of Jews at London and York in 1189–1190. In 1275, Edward I of England passed the Statute of Jewry which made usury illegal and linked it to blasphemy, in order to seize the assets of the violators. Scores of English Jews were arrested, 300 were hanged and their property went to the Crown. In 1290, all Jews were expelled from England, and allowed to take only what they could carry; the rest of their property became the Crown's. The usury was cited as the official reason for the Edict of Expulsion. However, not all Jews were expelled: it was easy to convert to Christianity and thereby avoid expulsion. Many other crowned heads of Europe expelled the Jews, although again conversion to Christianity meant that you were no longer considered a Jew (see the articles on marranos or crypto-Judaism).
Christians were prohibited by the Church from charging interest on loans and in many regions prohibited from banking entirely, particularly after Clement the V's declaration in 1311. The battle between the merchant class and the Church over the doctrine of interest resulted in merchant bankers (including many former Templar families) devising a set of three contracts called "Contractum Trinius" that included a guarantee and insurance policy against the bankruptcy of the borrower, sale of rights to profit on the use of the capital, as well as a collateral agreement. Contractum Trinius finally circumvented the Church's ban on interest. Eventually the Church rescinded its ban following the School of Salamanca's determination that interest was legitimate. Protestant countries rapidly legalized interest when they broke from the Church.
It can be shown that where banking arose and flourished in Europe, so too did economic growth, political power, and cultural and technological progress of the Rennaissance. Spain, being an excessively Catholic country, was one of the last to embrace banking and interest and as a result fell significantly behind the economic growth of the rest of europe. Conversely, as an example, Holland, which was Spanish territory until the 80 Years War begun by William the Silent of Orange, a dutch Elector who led the initial dutch protestant revolt against Spanish occupation, embraced banking to such an extent that by the end of the 80 Years War, Holland, a tiny country, was more powerful economically than Spain.
Last month, the International Monetary Fund released its annual review of U.S. economic policy. Its summary contained these bland words about U.S. fiscal policy: “Directors welcomed the authorities’ commitment to fiscal stabilization, but noted that a larger than budgeted adjustment would be required to stabilize debt-to-GDP.”
But delve deeper, and you will find that the IMF has effectively pronounced the U.S. bankrupt. Section 6 of the July 2010 Selected Issues Paper says: “The U.S. fiscal gap associated with today’s federal fiscal policy is huge for plausible discount rates.” It adds that “closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 percent of U.S. GDP.”
Diogenes wrote:U.S. Is Bankrupt and We Don't Even Know It:
Last month, the International Monetary Fund released its annual review of U.S. economic policy. Its summary contained these bland words about U.S. fiscal policy: “Directors welcomed the authorities’ commitment to fiscal stabilization, but noted that a larger than budgeted adjustment would be required to stabilize debt-to-GDP.”
But delve deeper, and you will find that the IMF has effectively pronounced the U.S. bankrupt. Section 6 of the July 2010 Selected Issues Paper says: “The U.S. fiscal gap associated with today’s federal fiscal policy is huge for plausible discount rates.” It adds that “closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 percent of U.S. GDP.”
I wish we could get back the $ trillion we wasted on the drug war. It would have made a dent. In any case it would be a good place to start cutting. Deploy all those resources to something productive. Or at least less destructive.
DRUG WAR = BIG GOVERNMENT
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
I wish we could get back the $ trillion we wasted on the drug war. It would have made a dent. In any case it would be a good place to start cutting. Deploy all those resources to something productive. Or at least less destructive.
DRUG WAR = BIG GOVERNMENT
You dont get it, do you?
If it is not the drugs, then it will be prostitution. If it is not prostitution or drugs, then it will be fraud, or hackers, or music/game/movie piracy, or grand theft auto, or whatever. Those criminals that are selling drugs today would just shift their criminal energies elsewhere. The only thing that will be different is that you will have A LOT more drug addicts that society will have to cary and that will cost society a lot (e.g. treatments for overdoses, cancers, dementia, traffic accidents and other ailments caused by drug abuse, as well as petty crimes commited by drug addicts in order to finance their addiction).
So I dont think that you would have been able to save as much as a single cent of those 1 trillion (if that number is even a real number, it sounds made up to me). It would have just been spent on fighting other crimes and on dragging addicts along in society.
Not sure whether that is more desireable than just fighting the drugs.
I wish we could get back the $ trillion we wasted on the drug war. It would have made a dent. In any case it would be a good place to start cutting. Deploy all those resources to something productive. Or at least less destructive.
DRUG WAR = BIG GOVERNMENT
You dont get it, do you?
If it is not the drugs, then it will be prostitution. If it is not prostitution or drugs, then it will be fraud, or hackers, or music/game/movie piracy, or grand theft auto, or whatever. Those criminals that are selling drugs today would just shift their criminal energies elsewhere. The only thing that will be different is that you will have A LOT more drug addicts that society will have to cary and that will cost society a lot (e.g. treatments for overdoses, cancers, dementia, traffic accidents and other ailments caused by drug abuse, as well as petty crimes commited by drug addicts in order to finance their addiction).
So I dont think that you would have been able to save as much as a single cent of those 1 trillion (if that number is even a real number, it sounds made up to me). It would have just been spent on fighting other crimes and on dragging addicts along in society.
Not sure whether that is more desireable than just fighting the drugs.
Do you have any evidence for your points? Say what has happened in Switzerland since they legalized heroin? Or the explosion in crime in Portugal?
But I do get your main point. You would prefer criminals concentrate on selling drugs so you believe price supports for drugs are essential.
Which supports my thesis that Government in general is a Criminal enterprise.
Have you considered what good the government could do if it supported robbery? Unlikely to happen though. I do not believe governments would like the competition. They prefer to do the robbing themselves.
Now, you keep telling me you are not a socialist. Perhaps you are fibbing a little.
Perhaps your argument with socialism is not philosophical but merely one of application. i.e. socialism is bad for business generally but essential for criminal enterprise. Then politicians can make friends with the criminals. Birds of a feather flock together.
How amusing.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
Skipjack wrote:If it is not the drugs, then it will be prostitution. If it is not prostitution or drugs, then it will be fraud, or hackers, or music/game/movie piracy, or grand theft auto, or whatever.
I suppose you are right, hardened criminals will still be criminals.
But all the people who deal to support their habit will stop.
All the junkies who commit crimes - really stupid crimes like breaking a $300 window to steal a $20 item - will have less incentive.
Plus, all the dealers and junkies who now want nothing to do with cops will call in to talk about robberies and fraud. Because if it's legal to have the stuff that was stolen, well then it's just a normal robbery.
Prostitution and fraud and hacking and bulk piracy and auto theft are niches; criminals who operate in them spend years honing their skills.
The Drug War gives us a huge group of people who don't trust cops, because they are currently criminals - and who would NOT be criminals under a sane drug policy.
When drugs and alcohol were both legal and cheap, what was it the prohibitionists targeted?
Was it cocaine? Opium? Pot?
No... it was booze.
Trust that the people who lived with it all easy to get had a clue and could see the relative damage each was doing. Legalizing drugs would cause less damage than Alcohol does.
