The other night I watched part of a documentary called "When Rome ruled" and it was trying to explain what caused the Roman Empire to collapse. It was eerily similar to what is going on in the westerm world generally and in the U.S. specifically at this time, so I went searching and found this gem of part of an article that I thought very interesting.

Part of the Article.

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"In the end, it’s about violence

Here’s a passage from my novel, A Lodging of Wayfaring Men, that expressed this idea:

Coercion is the sine qua non of politics; the thing, without which, politics would not be politics. Indeed, if you remove coercion, politics becomes something else – economics.

Politics cannot exist without force. In the end, it rests on violence. No matter how much they colour everything red, white, and blue, violence or the threat of violence underpins it all. As Jim Rogers once wrote, “Somewhere in every process of taxation, a pistol is involved.”

Politics – government – is based upon a single transaction: Taking money from people against their will. Everything else they do falls apart without that.

You may think me rude for pointing this out, or you may come up with justifications for it, but the statement stands: Governments take money that they didn’t earn, by one type of coercion or another. If not, taxation would be voluntary and government would be just another business."

Comment:

As a species, we may have progressed materially, but definity not intellectually.

"We live in interesting times"

Good Luck to all!