Common Sense Commentary:  "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." George Santayana's famous observation.

But Georg Hagel responded that we do learn one thing from history ...."We learn from history that we do not learn from history".

America has been given literally thousands of warning signs ... but alas, we, as a nation, ignored them all and proceeded full speed ahead ... and over the precipice.... another empire lost. RB

America’s Decadence Signals End of an Empire

By Erika Nolan, Executive Publisher of The Sovereign Society

Sir John Glubb, a British author and lecturer, argued that most empires generally don’t last longer than 250 years.

Greek Empire? 231 years. Roman Empire? 207 years. Ottoman Empire? 250 years. Romanov Russian Empire? 234 years. British Empire? 250 years.

The United States of America?

Well, we’re sitting at a ripe old age of 237 and deep in the midst of what Glubb called the Age of Decadence — the final stage of an empire that is marked by defensiveness, pessimism, materialism, frivolity, and the Welfare State.

But we’re too big and powerful to fail! This is America, the land of freedom and opportunity.

I’m sure the Greeks and the Romans felt much the same way.

The fall of the Greek empire is, among other things, a story of a top-heavy government that could not tax enough producers to sustain a growing number of bureaucrats. Conflict and competition between city-states destroyed a sense of national unity. And the citizens were more interested in living the good life than in nurturing their culture.

The demise of ancient Rome has been assigned to many culprits. The empire became a dictatorship, with the citizens removed from the act of governing. Heavy taxes were paid by the provinces to support the luxuries of Rome. To pay for their excesses, emperors devalued the currency. And a generous welfare state, manipulated by elites to gain power, eventually bankrupted the empire.

But that was hundreds of years ago. Things are different now.

Really? Let’s see …

American citizens have never been more affluent. We  have wondrous new discoveries of oil and natural gas;  the biggest threat to our national health is obesity, not  hunger; we have easy access to the greatest technology  in the world; we have the world’s strongest military; and  we enjoy a relatively stable system of government.  We are on a course of destruction and decay that has struck down too many countries before us. As a nation, we have lost sight of our founding principles of liberty and the pursuit of prosperity. The Age of Decadence We have become a nation that pursues a policy of enforced equality, rather than unconstrained opportunity and liberty. We have become a nation that argues over receiving entitlement goodies, even as we continue to pile up trillion-dollar annual deficits. And we have become a nation addicted to debt-fueled instant gratification, spending our future on consumption today. The result is the some $17 trillion of national debt — more than $148,000 per taxpayer. We have also created trillions of dollars in new money supply that, besides creating asset bubbles in housing and student loans, will ultimately destroy our currency. And our government passed a wasteful and ineffective $800 billion economic “stimulus” plan packed with spoils for its key constituencies — and that was just for starters. What this ruling class chicanery has produced are real unemployment figures that show that nearly every fifth person in America is out of work. At the same time, every fifth person relies on food stamps. And we have loaned more than $1 trillion of money that we don’t have to college students who can’t pay it back because they are relying on jobs that no longer exist. Much like the ruling classes in ancient Greece and Rome, our government is focused on redistributing our declining wealth, instead of pursuing policies that foster the private sector’s creation of it. The Dangers of Decline The United States is but 237 years old, but her decline is clearly underway. U.S. debts are so large they will never be fully repaid, so a default is coming. Meanwhile, U.S. interest rates are so low and government is so reliant on short-term debt to fund daily operations that when interest rates begin to rise, the cost of running American government could spiral out of control, destroying the dollar.