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Debt Slavery – Why It Destroyed Rome, Why It Will Destroy Us Unless It’s Stopped
Here's some interesting weekend reading about Debt Slavery and our place in its long history. ~ Ilene
Debt Slavery – Why It Destroyed Rome, Why It Will Destroy Us Unless It’s StoppedCourtesy of MICHAEL HUDSON
Published at CounterPunch
Aristotle, The Louvre - Wikicommons Eric Gaba (Sting)
Book V of Aristotle’s Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies – which end up being overthrown by tyrants or develop internal rivalries as some families decide to “take the multitude into their camp” and usher in democracy, within which an oligarchy emerges once again, followed by aristocracy, democracy, and so on throughout history.
Debt has been the main dynamic driving these shifts – always with new twists and turns. It polarizes wealth to create a creditor class, whose oligarchic rule is ended as new leaders (“tyrants” to Aristotle) win popular support by cancelling the debts and redistributing property or taking its usufruct for the state.
Since the Renaissance, however, bankers have shifted their political support to democracies. This did not reflect egalitarian or liberal political convictions as such, but rather a desire for better security for their loans. As James Steuart explained in 1767, royal borrowings remained private affairs rather than truly public debts. For a sovereign’s debts to become binding upon the entire nation, elected representatives had to enact the taxes to pay their interest charges.
By giving taxpayers this voice in government, the Dutch and British democracies provided creditors with much safer claims for payment than did kings and princes whose debts died with them. But the recent debt protests from Iceland to Greece and Spain suggest that creditors are shifting their support away from democracies. They are demanding fiscal austerity and even privatization sell-offs.
This is turning international finance into a new mode of warfare. Its objective is the same as military conquest in times past: to appropriate land and mineral resources, also communal infrastructure and extract tribute. In response, democracies are demanding referendums over whether to pay creditors by selling off the public domain and raising taxes to impose unemployment, falling wages and economic depression. The alternative is to write down debts or even annul them, and to re-assert regulatory control over the financial sector.
Near Eastern rulers proclaimed clean slates for debtors to preserve economic balance
Charging interest on advances of goods or money was not originally intended to polarize economies. First administered early in the third millennium BC as a contractual arrangement by Sumer’s temples and palaces with merchants and entrepreneurs who typically worked in the royal bureaucracy, interest at 20 per cent (doubling the principal in five years) was supposed to approximate a fair share of the returns from long-distance trade or leasing land and other public assets such as workshops, boats and ale houses.
As the practice was privatized by royal collectors of user fees and rents, “divine kingship” protected agrarian debtors. Hammurabi’s laws (c. 1750 BC) cancelled their debts in times of flood or drought. All the rulers of his Babylonian dynasty began their first full year on the throne by cancelling agrarian debts so as to clear out payment arrears by proclaiming a clean slate. Bondservants, land or crop rights and other pledges were returned to the debtors to “restore order” in an idealized “original” condition of balance. This practice survived in the Jubilee Year of Mosaic Law in Leviticus 25.
The logic was clear enough. Ancient societies needed to field armies to defend their land, and this required liberating indebted citizens from bondage. Hammurabi’s laws protected charioteers and other fighters from being reduced to debt bondage, and blocked creditors from taking the crops of tenants on royal and other public lands and on communal land that owed manpower and military service to the palace.
In Egypt, the pharaoh Bakenranef (c. 720-715 BC, “Bocchoris” in Greek) proclaimed a debt amnesty and abolished debt-servitude when faced with a military threat from Ethiopia. According to Diodorus of Sicily (I, 79, writing in 40-30 BC), he ruled that if a debtor contested the claim, the debt was nullified if the creditor could not back up his claim by producing a written contract. (It seems that creditors always have been prone to exaggerate the balances due.) The pharaoh reasoned that “the bodies of citizens should belong to the state, to the end that it might avail itself of the services which its citizens owed it, in times of both war and peace. For he felt that it would be absurd for a soldier … to be haled to prison by his creditor for an unpaid loan, and that the greed of private citizens should in this way endanger the safety of all.”
The fact that the main Near Eastern creditors were the palace, temples and their collectors made it politically easy to cancel the debts. It always is easy to annul debts owed to oneself. Even Roman emperors burned the tax records to prevent a crisis. But it was much harder to cancel debts owed to private creditors as the practice of charging interest spread westward to Mediterranean chiefdoms after about 750 BC. Instead of enabling families to bridge gaps between income and outgo, debt became the major lever of land expropriation, polarizing communities between creditor oligarchies and indebted clients. In Judah, the prophet Isaiah (5:8-9) decried foreclosing creditors who “add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land.”
Creditor power and stable growth rarely have gone together. Most personal debts in this classical period were the product of small amounts of money lent to individuals living on the edge of subsistence and who could not make ends meet. Forfeiture of land and assets – and personal liberty – forced debtors into bondage that became irreversible. By the 7th century BC, “tyrants” (popular leaders) emerged to overthrow the aristocracies in Corinth and other wealthy Greek cities, gaining support by cancelling the debts. In a less tyrannical manner, Solon founded the Athenian democracy in 594 BC by banning debt bondage.
But oligarchies re-emerged and called in Rome when Sparta’s kings Agis, Cleomenes and their successor Nabis sought to cancel debts late in the third century BC. They were killed and their supporters driven out. It has been a political constant of history since antiquity that creditor interests opposed both popular democracy and royal power able to limit the financial conquest of society – a conquest aimed at attaching interest-bearing debt claims for payment on as much of the economic surplus as possible.
When the Gracchi brothers and their followers tried to reform the credit laws in 133 BC, the dominant Senatorial class acted with violence, killing them and inaugurating a century of Social War, resolved by the ascension of Augustus as emperor in 29 BC.
Rome’s creditor oligarchy wins the Social War, enslaves the population and brings on a Dark Age
Matters were more bloody abroad. Aristotle did not mention empire building as part of his political schema, but foreign conquest always has been a major factor in imposing debts, and war debts have been the major cause of public debt in modern times. Antiquity’s harshest debt levy was by Rome, whose creditors spread out to plague Asia Minor, its most prosperous province. The rule of law all but disappeared when publican creditor “knights” arrived. Mithridates of Pontus led three popular revolts, and local populations in Ephesus and other cities rose up and killed a reported 80,000 Romans in 88 BC. The Roman army retaliated, and Sulla imposed war tribute of 20,000 talents in 84 BC. Charges for back interest multiplied this sum six-fold by 70 BC.
Among Rome’s leading historians, Livy, Plutarch and Diodorus blamed the fall of the Republic on creditor intransigence in waging the century-long Social War marked by political murder from 133 to 29 BC. Populist leaders sought to gain a following by advocating debt cancellations (e.g., the Catiline conspiracy in 63-62 BC). They were killed. By the second century AD about a quarter of the population was reduced to bondage. By the fifth century Rome’s economy collapsed, stripped of money. Subsistence life reverted to the countryside.
Creditors find a legalistic reason to support parliamentary democracy
When banking recovered after the Crusades looted Byzantium and infused silver and gold to review Western European commerce, Christian opposition to charging interest was overcome by the combination of prestigious lenders (the Knights Templars and Hospitallers providing credit during the Crusades) and their major clients – kings, at first to pay the Church and increasingly to wage war. But royal debts went bad when kings died. The Bardi and Peruzzi went bankrupt in 1345 when Edward III repudiated his war debts. Banking families lost more on loans to the Habsburg and Bourbon despots on the thrones of Spain, Austria and France.
Matters changed with the Dutch democracy, seeking to win and secure its liberty from Habsburg Spain. The fact that their parliament was to contract permanent public debts on behalf of the state enabled the Low Countries to raise loans to employ mercenaries in an epoch when money and credit were the sinews of war. Access to credit “was accordingly their most powerful weapon in the struggle for their freedom,” Richard Ehrenberg wrote in his Capital and Finance in the Age of the Renaissance (1928): “Anyone who gave credit to a prince knew that the repayment of the debt depended only on his debtor’s capacity and will to pay. The case was very different for the cities, which had power as overlords, but were also corporations, associations of individuals held in common bond. According to the generally accepted law each individual burgher was liable for the debts of the city both with his person and his property.”
The financial achievement of parliamentary government was thus to establish debts that were not merely the personal obligations of princes, but were truly public and binding regardless of who occupied the throne. This is why the first two democratic nations, the Netherlands and Britain after its 1688 revolution, developed the most active capital markets and proceeded to become leading military powers. What is ironic is that it was the need for war financing that promoted democracy, forming a symbiotic trinity between war making, credit and parliamentary democracy which has lasted to this day.
At this time “the legal position of the King qua borrower was obscure, and it was still doubtful whether his creditors had any remedy against him in case of default.” (Charles Wilson, England’s Apprenticeship: 1603-1763: 1965.) The more despotic Spain, Austria and France became, the greater the difficulty they found in financing their military adventures. By the end of the eighteenth century Austria was left “without credit, and consequently without much debt,” the least credit-worthy and worst armed country in Europe, fully dependent on British subsidies and loan guarantees by the time of the Napoleonic Wars.
Finance accommodates itself to democracy, but then pushes for oligarchy
While the nineteenth century’s democratic reforms reduced the power of landed aristocracies to control parliaments, bankers moved flexibly to achieve a symbiotic relationship with nearly every form of government. In France, followers of Saint-Simon promoted the idea of banks acting like mutual funds, extending credit against equity shares in profit. The German state made an alliance with large banking and heavy industry. Marx wrote optimistically about how socialism would make finance productive rather than parasitic. In the United States, regulation of public utilities went hand in hand with guaranteed returns. In China, Sun-Yat-Sen wrote in 1922: “I intend to make all the national industries of China into a Great Trust owned by the Chinese people, and financed with international capital for mutual benefit.”
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World War I saw the United States replace Britain as the major creditor nation, and by the end of World War II it had cornered some 80 per cent of the world’s monetary gold. Its diplomats shaped the IMF and World Bank along creditor-oriented lines that financed trade dependency, mainly on the United States. Loans to finance trade and payments deficits were subject to “conditionalities” that shifted economic planning to client oligarchies and military dictatorships. The democratic response to resulting austerity plans squeezing out debt service was unable to go much beyond “IMF riots,” until Argentina rejected its foreign debt.
A similar creditor-oriented austerity is now being imposed on Europe by the European Central Bank (ECB) and EU bureaucracy. Ostensibly social democratic governments have been directed to save the banks rather than reviving economic growth and employment. Losses on bad bank loans and speculations are taken onto the public balance sheet while scaling back public spending and even selling off infrastructure. The response of taxpayers stuck with the resulting debt has been to mount popular protests starting in Iceland and Latvia in January 2009, and more widespread demonstrations in Greece and Spain this autumn to protest their governments’ refusal to hold referendums on these fateful bailouts of foreign bondholders.
Shifting planning away from elected public representatives to bankers
Every economy is planned. This traditionally has been the function of government. Relinquishing this role under the slogan of “free markets” leaves it in the hands of banks. Yet the planning privilege of credit creation and allocation turns out to be even more centralized than that of elected public officials. And to make matters worse, the financial time frame is short-term hit-and-run, ending up as asset stripping. By seeking their own gains, the banks tend to destroy the economy. The surplus ends up being consumed by interest and other financial charges, leaving no revenue for new capital investment or basic social spending.
This is why relinquishing policy control to a creditor class rarely has gone together with economic growth and rising living standards. The tendency for debts to grow faster than the population’s ability to pay has been a basic constant throughout all recorded history. Debts mount up exponentially, absorbing the surplus and reducing much of the population to the equivalent of debt peonage. To restore economic balance, antiquity’s cry for debt cancellation sought what the Bronze Age Near East achieved by royal fiat: to cancel the overgrowth of debts.
In more modern times, democracies have urged a strong state to tax rentier income and wealth, and when called for, to write down debts. This is done most readily when the state itself creates money and credit. It is done least easily when banks translate their gains into political power. When banks are permitted to be self-regulating and given veto power over government regulators, the economy is distorted to permit creditors to indulge in the speculative gambles and outright fraud that have marked the past decade. The fall of the Roman Empire demonstrates what happens when creditor demands are unchecked. Under these conditions the alternative to government planning and regulation of the financial sector becomes a road to debt peonage.
Finance vs. government; oligarchy vs. democracy
Democracy involves subordinating financial dynamics to serve economic balance and growth – and taxing rentier income or keeping basic monopolies in the public domain. Untaxing or privatizing property income “frees” it to be pledged to the banks, to be capitalized into larger loans. Financed by debt leveraging, asset-price inflation increases rentier wealth while indebting the economy at large. The economy shrinks, falling into negative equity.
The financial sector has gained sufficient influence to use such emergencies as an opportunity to convince governments that the economy will collapse they it do not “save the banks.” In practice this means consolidating their control over policy, which they use in ways that further polarize economies. The basic model is what occurred in ancient Rome, moving from democracy to oligarchy. In fact, giving priority to bankers and leaving economic planning to be dictated by the EU, ECB and IMF threatens to strip the nation-state of the power to coin or print money and levy taxes.
The resulting conflict is pitting financial interests against national self-determination. The idea of an independent central bank being “the hallmark of democracy” is a euphemism for relinquishing the most important policy decision – the ability to create money and credit – to the financial sector. Rather than leaving the policy choice to popular referendums, the rescue of banks organized by the EU and ECB now represents the largest category of rising national debt. The private bank debts taken onto government balance sheets in Ireland and Greece have been turned into taxpayer obligations. The same is true for America’s $13 trillion added since September 2008 (including $5.3 trillion in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bad mortgages taken onto the government’s balance sheet, and $2 trillion of Federal Reserve “cash-for-trash” swaps).
This is being dictated by financial proxies euphemized as technocrats. Designated by creditor lobbyists, their role is to calculate just how much unemployment and depression is needed to squeeze out a surplus to pay creditors for debts now on the books. What makes this calculation self-defeating is the fact that economic shrinkage – debt deflation – makes the debt burden even more unpayable.
Neither banks nor public authorities (or mainstream academics, for that matter) calculated the economy’s realistic ability to pay – that is, to pay without shrinking the economy. Through their media and think tanks, they have convinced populations that the way to get rich most rapidly is to borrow money to buy real estate, stocks and bonds rising in price – being inflated by bank credit – and to reverse the past century’s progressive taxation of wealth.
To put matters bluntly, the result has been junk economics. Its aim is to disable public checks and balances, shifting planning power into the hands of high finance on the claim that this is more efficient than public regulation. Government planning and taxation is accused of being “the road to serfdom,” as if “free markets” controlled by bankers given leeway to act recklessly is not planned by special interests in ways that are oligarchic, not democratic. Governments are told to pay bailout debts taken on not to defend countries in military warfare as in times past, but to benefit the wealthiest layer of the population by shifting its losses onto taxpayers.
The failure to take the wishes of voters into consideration leaves the resulting national debts on shaky ground politically and even legally. Debts imposed by fiat, by governments or foreign financial agencies in the face of strong popular opposition may be as tenuous as those of the Habsburgs and other despots in past epochs. Lacking popular validation, they may die with the regime that contracted them. New governments may act democratically to subordinate the banking and financial sector to serve the economy, not the other way around.
At the very least, they may seek to pay by re-introducing progressive taxation of wealth and income, shifting the fiscal burden onto rentier wealth and property. Re-regulation of banking and providing a public option for credit and banking services would renew the social democratic program that seemed well underway a century ago.
Iceland and Argentina are most recent examples, but one may look back to the moratorium on Inter-Ally arms debts and German reparations in 1931.A basic mathematical as well as political principle is at work: Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be.
This article appears in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung on December 5, 2011.
MICHAEL HUDSON is a former Wall Street economist. A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), he is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto Press, 2002) and Trade, Development and Foreign Debt: A History of Theories of Polarization v. Convergence in the World Economy. He can be reached via his website, michael-hudson.com
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I had just finished saying what an excellent job the author did in avoiding the elephant in the room. And then you go and step in the feces.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwLSeaCV6N0&feature=related
zerohedge....a new kkk club. didn't realize you panzies still had any fight left in you.
too bad you bring disgrace to good hearted organizations like oath keepers and others. in time the freemen with guns, will realize your bad for their message and shut you up the hard way.
Zerohedge.....same old likudnik club. Only thing missing is some bbq Palestinian children.
Marx was almost right. The conflict is not between rich and poor, but rather between savers and debtors. One way is to stay out of the conflict altogether, hence the advice "neither a borrower nor a lender be".
If you save money and lend it to people, you are the bad guy. If you borrow money you can't afford, and refuse to pay, you're the bad guy.
An essay on exactly that point: FOFOA: Debtors & Savers
I disagree. The bad guys are the ones who create money out of air at no cost and charge interest to those who use it, then through economic manipulation make it impossible for the debtor to pay, taking their assets and throwing them into debtor prison, bondage or economically forced military serivice for corrupt wars (as if there is any other kind). That is the bad guy.
The saver is a victim as well, because the banker continually decreases the value of his holdings through inflation. Only those that can charge taxes, interest or rents can be free... which makes the opprtunity for being good as well as free limited.
Pimpinomics
Fantastic article. Saved for reference and reading later.
Rome was destroyed thru self absorption/self indulgence to the extreme, homsexuality, lesbianism, and most of all, a lack of Romans having children.
Their population of real Romans got so small, they had to hire Mercs to fght their wars, and the Mercs took them out because of their sin,vice,self indulgences, and moral corruption.
IOW, they Grayed out, and lost the world.
you mean they let women drive??
who made that one up?
Look into it. They brought in legions of foreigners to empty their chamber pots and mind their shrinking number of babies. Sounds familiar.
don't forget. they learned from someone, a novel concept. they could create money out of thin air. it was called interest..........worked for a while but then later on, not so much..........
Aristotle comes out against lending for interest ("usury") in that same Politics, calling it the least productive way to make money.
Islam forbids both lending and borrowing at interest, favoring instead equity, where profit or loss are shared. It was this way in Christendom as well, up to the Renaissance. Both Islam and Aristotle recognize that if the creditor has some skin in the game, he'll make sure that the purpose for which the money is being used is likely to bear fruit.
Central banking takes this a step further. If a banker creates $100 out of thin air and lends it to you at interest, where will the money for you pay the interest come from? As best I can tell, that money too must be conjured out of the air (by your employer, for example). The game goes on this way, debt (and interest) expand, and 0% rates and devaluations become essential for debtors, which eventually is most countries, companies, local govts, and individuals.
There's nothing wrong with charging interest on capital. Getting the principal back IS 'skin in the game' enough that the borrower & lenders' interests roughly align. Furthermore, there has to be some incentive for the lender to forgo using his capital now, and also cover the risk he won't receive all, or, indeed, any, of his capital back. And, of course, in an economy like ours where the base money is being constantly expanded, a lender needs to charge interest just to stop the value of his lent-out money being eroded by inflation.
The problem arises when a fractional reserve bank lends out money that doesn't exist, opaquely, via fractional reserve lending, thereby expanding the money supply, and causing wild gyrations in asset values. When I say 'opaquely', I mean when the currency lent ostensibly represents a hard asset (say, multiples of ounces of gold), but the market cannot discount the currency's actual value in specie because it is a government-sanctioned legal tender, ie,` in reality the issued currency actually represents less gold than its face value.
I believe somewhere I've seen an explanation of the "where does the interest money come from?" question, which doesn't necessitate the creation of new debt money, and it has something to do with the difference of stocks and flows. But I tried (briefly) recreating it with a (simplified but representative) example of three people on an island, one of whom is the banker, and I couldn't get it to work... can anyone else chip in here?
lolwut?
et tu, Obama ???????
You got picked up by Reddit.
Outstanding, blog post, Ilene, and I present these three outstanding links, which are connected (if one is self-aware and intelligent):
http://www.edmaysproductions.net/webvideo/bezruchka.wmv
http://markcrispinmiller.com/2011/02/eight-big-problems-with-the-case-against-assange-must-read-by-naomi-wolf/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuC_4mGTs98&feature=player_embedded
One of the best articles out there - a truely great read.
I love history, and as Mark Twain is quoted as saying, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."
Governments are told to pay bailout debts taken on not to defend countries in military warfare as in times past, but to benefit the wealthiest layer of the population by shifting its losses onto taxpayers.
No further explanation required.
We're focusing on the wrong debt:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/310796-have-we-been-looking-at-the-wrong...
Excessive amounts of debt is bad. Public or private stpioc.
Everyone that read this gets 3 credit hours toward their degree program. Wow
Hi Ilene,
I am probably one of maybe two or three people here that had classical language training as part of my education.And YES I know - it dates me.However these things are rarely if ever wasted.If I am not too old to remember correctly there are manuals from Roman times on...slavekeeping.Very rational and with a lot of a pragmatical psychological approach.Why don´t you look it up.These ancient scriptures are quite thoughtprovoking...
Yup, if producers don't see that their productions, their innovations, can't bring them a better life -- then they simply give up.
Happened in Rome. Is happening in the USA. The number of top USA born and raised scientists on the sidelines, not even able to contribute to society, is enormous.
Regarding the end of the Roman Republic, Martin Armstrong has written that Julius Caesar was actually assassinated, because of wanting to bring debt relief to Roman citizens. The Roman senators who killed him were apparently the interest-collecting 'banksters' of that era, ready to spill blood to protect their profits.
This may well be true, but it must not make us forget that Caesar was an incredibly bloody and ruthless murderer. He instigated the Gallic wars to enrich himself and build up his reputation. He succeeded. He probably killed a million Gauls (not "barbarians" at all), enslaved even more (very profitable), and looted their temples of the riches gathered from centuries of piety. All because they had the "gall" to want to remain free of Roman domination. Sound familiar?
He was scum: intelligent, ruthless, courageous and competent--but his ego counted for more in his calculations than all those ruined lives.
"Crossing the Rubicon" meant willing the death of further hundreds of thousands of his fellow Romans. But he did it. History tends to be kind to the "successful".
Sounds a lot like the crowd we have over us now, although the competence level is questionable.
Lecture by Michael Parenti author of "The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IO_Ldn2H4o
Critique of "gentleman's history".
Kudos for mentioning Parenti! Turned his back on the Yale crowd in order to speak truth to power. Lots of great videos of his speeches available. One of the most enlightening and entertaining history professors I've ever heard and/or read.
No wonder they don't teach history in school.
Actually, they do. Unfortunately the materials really belong in the fiction section. As they say, history is written by the victors.
Exactly
Many empires throughout history simply run their course, however, the USA will fight to the death to keep theirs intact..
the people who control the debt feel no alliegence to the people of the united states. they are internationalists.... and until the late 1940's, had no country to call their own. the banking system is nothing but the worlds's oldest crime syndicate.
Is this the MPLA?
or is this the UDA?
or is this the IRA?
I thought it was the UK
Or just another country
Another council tenancy (the UK term for public housing)
Boy that elephant in the room has a huge nose. Nice work ignoring him!
Starve The BEAST! Run up your unsecured debt! The, DON'T PAY! Buy Gold and Silver. Food and Water! Guns & Ammo! Let the SHTF around you.
"Then don't pay." Yeah, because when the time comes for scrabbling for nickels, and you owe a fortune, the debtors won't hire a bunch of desperate-for-work-goons, and force you to pay. How about; "Save, buy the same stuff cash, and remote property, with the smallest paper trail possible, then when the SHTF around you, GTFO." Buying stuff on credit, and giving the system an excuse to confiscate it from you when its the only thing left of value, or forcing you to sell it for pennies on the dollar to cover your debts IS THEIR GOAL.
See title of Post Debt slavery, since the Roman empire. These guys know what they're doing.
Unsecured Debt is easy to walk away from. The creditor gets payed twice. Plus interest. Heck. If you open a CC, the bankster gets $1000 without you charging a penny. You never incurred a debt. That is your strawman. The corporate fiction.
We are all indentured servants to our debts...either now or in the future when we can't pay them. Remember debtor's prison?
http://www.planbeconomics.com/2010/09/07/you-are-an-indentured-servant-t...
And don't forget the "Fair share of taxes" issue. When close to 50% of Americans, and growing, don't pay ANY Federal Income taxes, note carefully the following (Attributed to Alexander Tytler):
"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship".
The British Empire would be a more recent, and better, example. Divide and conquer, as in Democrats versus Republicans, works until it doesn't work. Religion is no longer "The Opium of the people". At which point, refer back to the last part of the above quote. Revolution and dictatorship. The Police State in the US, now that US citizens can be detained indefinitely without charge on US soil at the will of the executive branch is moving nicely along this direction.