by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n
Why do once-successful societies ossify and decline?<\/p>\n
Hundreds of reasons have been adduced for the fall of Rome and the end of the Old Regime in 18th-century France. Reasons run from inflation and excessive spending to resource depletion and enemy invasion, as historians attempt to understand the sudden collapse of the Mycenaeans, the Aztecs and, apparently, the modern Greeks. In literature from Catullus to Edward Gibbon, wealth and leisure \u2014 and who gets the most of both \u2014 more often than poverty and exhaustion implode civilization<\/p>\n
One recurring theme seems consistent in Athenian literature on the eve of the city’s takeover by Macedon: social squabbling over slicing up a shrinking pie. Athenian speeches from that era make frequent reference to lawsuits over property and inheritance, evading taxes, and fudging eligibility for the dole. After the end of the Roman Republic, reactionary Latin literature \u2014 from the likes of Juvenal, Petronius, Suetonius, Tacitus \u2014 pointed to “bread and circuses,” as well as excessive wealth, corruption and top-heavy government.<\/p>\n
For Gibbon and later French scholars, “Byzantine” became a pejorative description of a top-heavy Greek bureaucracy that could not tax enough vanishing producers to sustain a growing number of bureaucrats. In antiquity, inflating the currency by turning out cheap bronze coins was often the favored way to pay off public debts, while the law became fluid to address popular demands rather than to protect time-honored justice.<\/p>\n
After the end of World War II, most of today’s powerhouses were either in ruins or still preindustrial \u2014 China, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Russia and Taiwan. Only the United States and Great Britain had sophisticated economies that survived the destruction of the war. Both were poised to resupply a devastated world with new ships, cars, machinery and communications.<\/p>\n
In comparison to Frankfurt, the factories of 1945 Liverpool had survived mostly intact. Yet Britain missed out on the postwar German economic miracles, in part because after the deprivations of the war, the war-weary British turned to class warfare and nationalized their main industries, which soon became uncompetitive.<\/p>\n
The gradual decline of a society is often a self-induced process of trying to meet ever-expanding appetites, rather than a physical inability to produce past levels of food and fuel, or to maintain adequate defense. Americans have never had safer workplaces or more sophisticated medical care \u2014 and never have so many been on disability.<\/p>\n
King Xerxes’ huge Persian force of 250,000 sailors and soldiers could not defeat a rather poor Greece in 480-479 BC. Yet a century and a half later, a much smaller invading force from the north under Philip II of Macedon overwhelmed the far more prosperous Greek descendants of the victors of Salamis.<\/p>\n
For hundreds of years, the outmanned legions of the tiny and poor Roman Republic survived foreign invasions. Yet centuries later, tribal Goths, Visigoths, Vandals and Huns overran the huge Mediterranean-wide Roman Empire.<\/p>\n
Given our unsustainable national debt \u2014 nearly $17 trillion and climbing \u2014 America is said to be in decline, although we face no devastating plague, nuclear holocaust, or shortage of oil or food.<\/p>\n
Americans have never led such affluent material lives \u2014 at least as measured by access to cell phones, big-screen TVs, cheap jet travel and fast food. Obesity rather than malnutrition is the greater threat to national health. Flash mobs go after electronics stores, not food markets. Americans spend more money on Botox, face lifts and tummy tucks than on the age-old scourges of polio, small pox and malaria.<\/p>\n
If Martians looked at the small box houses, one-car families and primitive consumer goods of the 1950s, they would have thought the postwar United States, despite a balanced budget in 1956, was impoverished. In comparison, an indebted contemporary America would seem to aliens flush with cash, as consumers jostle for each new update to their iPhones.<\/p>\n
By any historical marker, the future of Americans has never been brighter. The United States has it all: undreamed new finds of natural gas and oil, the world’s pre-eminent food production, continual technological wizardly, strong demographic growth, a superb military and constitutional stability.<\/p>\n
Yet we don’t talk confidently about capitalizing and expanding on our natural and inherited wealth. Instead, Americans bicker over entitlement spoils as the nation continues to pile up trillion-dollar-plus deficits. Enforced equality rather than liberty is the new national creed. The medicine of cutting back on government goodies seems far worse than the disease of borrowing trillions from the unborn to pay for them.<\/p>\n
In August 1945, Hiroshima was in shambles, while Detroit was among the most innovative and wealthiest cities in the world. Contemporary Hiroshima now resembles a prosperous Detroit of 1945; parts of Detroit look like they were bombed decades ago.<\/p>\n
History has shown that a government’s redistribution of shrinking wealth, in preference to a private sector’s creation of new sources of it, can prove more destructive than even the most deadly enemy.<\/p>\n
\u00a92013 Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Why do once-successful societies ossify and decline? 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Look to their tragic history and geography.\u00a0 Not long ago, European Union bankers gave the Greeks a \u20ac110 billion bailout \u2014 along with stern recommendations to stop cooking their books, to go after tax cheaters, to trim fat\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Economy"","block_context":{"text":"Economy","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/economy-europe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6679,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-launch-of-the-freedom-academy\/","url_meta":{"origin":859,"position":3},"title":"The Launch of the Freedom Academy","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 29, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media\u00a0 Today launches\u00a0the Freedom Academy\u00ae, a project some 18 months in the making. In the present age, we need a meeting place where people can rediscover what freedom entails and appreciate the origins and role of liberty. The majority of Americans yearn for a rebirth\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Civilization"","block_context":{"text":"Civilization","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/civilization\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1049,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/civilization-in-reverse\/","url_meta":{"origin":859,"position":4},"title":"Civilization in Reverse","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 24, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services In Greek mythology, the prophetess Cassandra was doomed both to tell the truth and to be ignored. Our modern version is a bankrupt Greece that we seem to discount. News accounts abound now of impoverished Athens residents scrounging pharmacies for scarce aspirin \u2014\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "California"","block_context":{"text":"California","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/california\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9332,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/walls-and-immigration-ancient-and-modern\/","url_meta":{"origin":859,"position":5},"title":"Walls and Immigration \u2014 Ancient and Modern","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 2, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"The Roman empire faced a challenge similar to what the EU faces. By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online When standing today at Hadrian\u2019s Wall in\u00a0northern England, everything appears indistinguishably affluent and serene on both sides. It was not nearly as calm some 1,900 years ago. 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