From Victor Davis Hanson:
…We inherited a wonderful infrastructure from our parents. A superb system of politics and economics was likewise given to us at birth. Many of us try to copy our grandparents and parents whose values and work ethic we increasingly eulogize. But against all that is that Roman notion of luxus, untold wealth and leisure that we see juxtaposed with shrill cries and accusations that we are too poor, exploited, and in need of someone else’s income. The wealthier we become, the louder and angrier we become that we are not even more wealthy.
In short, what ruined Rome in the West? Lots of things. But clearly the pernicious effects of affluence and laxity warped Roman sensibility and created a culture of entitlement that was not justified by revenues or the creation of actual commensurate wealth — and the resulting debits, inflation, debased currency, and gradual state impoverishment gave the far more vulnerable Western Empire far less margin of error when barbarians arrived, or rival generals marched on Rome. For a while the Romanization of the wider Mediterranean subsidized this ennui, but eventually the old western and southern provinces neither could protect what they had created nor could continue to be as productive as in the past nor believed that being Roman was any better than the alternative.
The historian Will Durant, after surveying the decay of Rome in the 1st century AD, noted that “by its own exhausted will, the great race (of Romans) was beginning to die”. That is important – decline is a choice, not a fate. We are touched with decay while the rest of the western world is shot through with it. Thus far, the people of what was once called Christendom are choosing to die. Meanwhile, even those states which might want to supplant us have also started to choose to die – but being further back on the road, there is that prospect of a brief supremacy.
It was not a perversity on his part that St. Francis said, “Grant me the treasure of sublime poverty”. While we look back at the 13th century as a time of grinding poverty, the fact is that St. Francis was of a wealthy family and living in a society growing highly prosperous – perhaps as well off as anyone had been since the height of Rome. St. Francis knew, though, that wealth can be a killer – a killer of courage, mercy and love. Sublime poverty is what keeps a person – and a society – healthy.
So, are we all to burn our cash and go live as peasants in the countryside? It is a choice of “farm or die”? That depends on how one wishes to look at it – the real choice is between doing things and doing nothing. If we continue to do more and more nothing, then we’ll get progressively weaker, and eventually die. Not in a cataclysm, but in a slow drift to national senility and an eventual breakup of the nation and our replacement by anyone who wishes to do things on the land we slept upon.
One of the hardest thing for us to wrap our minds around is that, all along, sublime poverty was provided for us. Remember that our federal government is directly indebted for nearly $13 trillion dollars. The “most wealthy” nation spent $13 trillion it didn’t have – and when you tack on personal and State government debt and combine it with the unfunded mandates, we’re many tens of trillions of dollars in the hole. The harsh fact is that we weren’t as rich as we thought we were.
To be sure, we were vastly wealthy – and in very real terms, we retain such wealth. Its in our soil and in our ability to invest in sweat equity. We haven’t wanted to sweat and we’ve listened to idiots about the environment and thus closed off vast amounts of native wealth. But we never were rich enough for all those millions of people to get “free” health care. Never were rich enough for kids to get government grants to go to college. Never were rich enough to provide welfare for tens of millions of people. Our politicians talked of “how can the richest nation in the world not afford X” and we nodded our heads like morons – never fully understanding that being the richest nation in the world isn’t the same as having unlimited wealth for whatever struck our fancy.
We must get back to work. We must, in the end, have the courage to tell a high school graduate that he’s going to have to go to work and entirely pay for college on his own – or not go to college. We’re going to have to tell the shiftless poor that it is time to shift for themselves. We’re going to have to be brave enough to say to a person, “its sad you can’t afford that quadruple bypass”. We don’t have an endless supply of money – we do have an endless supply of resources and ability to work; an endless supply of love and generosity (maybe that oldster’s friends can pool their resources to pay for the bypass?), but we don’t have an endless supply of money. Sublime poverty sits at our knee, waiting for us to wake up.
And if we do wake up and get back to work and understand that all our whims will not be granted, then we will cease to die. We will become what we were – the America of our grandfathers will return. The choice is ours – live, or die. I chose to live and I’m beginning to believe that a large majority of my fellow Americans wish to live, too and understand what it will require.
Cross Posted at Noonan for Nevada
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