There are so many articles these days coming out of America comparing the present state of the American project with the later years of the Roman Empire that I normally don't trouble this blog's readers with them. This one, however, begins the comparison with a lament over an alleged fall in educational standards, so you might find it of interest. The omitted opening paragraphs betray the writer as right-wing ("another shrilly socialist female Democrat (who also offered up evidence on a regular basis that she might be shrilly socialist and psychotic to boot)" - you get the tone!), and lament the popularity of sport and celeb gossip. Now read on.

All of the worries over the quality — or lack thereof — in public education makes me wonder if students learn anything about the Roman Empire. American kids ought to be learning something about that, especially since the country that they live in is often called the greatest empire since the days of Rome's glory. I'd hope they're also learning about the fall of the Roman Empire too, particularly since that seems to have an even greater bearing on the country they live in.

Some scholars blame the fall of the Roman Empire on lead poisoning. The Romans used lead in their pipes and in their pottery. They used lead in their cooking pots and their utensils. As a result, their water, food, and drink was contaminated with lead causing most to have some level of lead poisoning. Lead poisoning has any number of symptoms, but in simplistic terms what it does is this: It makes you stupid.

With few exceptions, Americans don't typically have lead poisoning at any level. And yet there's a comparison to be drawn here, and I'm far from the first to have drawn it. Whether you blame lead or fluoride, or irresponsibility or bad schools, the fact remains that American students have (in general) dumbed down over the decades. And even if lead poisoning wasn't the only reason the Roman Empire fell, it's hard to argue that stupidity didn't contribute.

Some who have studied the Roman Empire also blame the fall on an overextension of the military and the accompanying drain on the public treasury. When the Empire could no longer afford to have troops stationed everywhere, it had no choice but to begin to pull them out. And when it did that, yet another contributor to the fall of the empire reared its ugly head: illegal immigration. Oh, they didn't call it illegal immigration then. They called it being overrun by barbarian hordes. But it was effectively illegal immigration.

When these barbarian hordes — or illegal immigrants, if you insist — came into the areas formerly held by the empire, the first thing that happened was the undermining of Roman society including such niceties as philosophy, art, education, the economy, and the common language necessary to ensure that all of those things flourished. Shortly thereafter, the infrastructure decayed when the upkeep of roads and the like was stopped. Not very long after that, the Republican form of government and the relative freedom Romans enjoyed was a distant memory.

I can't imagine that many can argue whether or not the American military is overextended. There's little question that that's the case. Certainly the reductions of the Clinton era didn't help with that, but wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined with an ongoing American presence in other places around the world are compounding the problem. We should likely be in some of these places and not in others, but that's not the point. The overextension is.

In part because of the military overextension and in even larger part thanks to entitlement programs, the federal budget is entirely out of control. The tax-and-spend Democrats just elected to control of Congress are likely to escalate the programs of the tax-and-spend Republicans we just kicked out of office, and little will change except the names of the people we're blaming. And still I'd be willing to bet that more people will watch the Super Bowl than will vote (in 2004, a presidential election year which enjoyed what was considered a high voter turn-out, only 55% of eligible voters bothered).

But those 55% — and the lesser numbers who voted in a Democratic majority this year — are representative of the most significant (at least in my mind) factor in the fall of the Roman Empire: sloth and greed.

John Locke, who is much revered as a libertarian philosopher, said, "The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves." Yet they do just that each and every time they tell the government to steal from the rest of us for their benefit — and that's precisely what entitlement programs and Congressional pork projects do.

The people keep voting for those politicians who get the most for them via those entitlement programs and pork projects, and then they wonder how it is that the politicians they elect do a poor job of representing, or why some are unethical in their lives and in their jobs. They apparently don't realize that, as Alexis de Tocqueville put it, "The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money." When such jobs can be bought — and when those who get those jobs can be bought in turn — you can bet that corruption will follow.

Call it the result of immorality (also a common accusation of American society from some corners today as well as another reason some suggest the Roman Empire declined), or point to the "bread and circuses" mentality of ancient Romans (most of us have little room to talk in the wake of obsessions with football games or entertainment personalities). But the real and most direct comparison remains those cited above: sloth and greed.

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship." Alexander Fraser Tyler in The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic.

We've been a democratic republic now for 230 years. We've been effectively voting ourselves money from the public treasury for the last 100 or so years. We can compound that with loose borders, overextended military forces, porous borders and the accompanying invasion, a lack of education, and a determination to pay more attention to our modern versions of bread and circuses than to the writing on the wall telling of our own pending downfall. We can add to all that our readily apparent inability to learn from history. In fact, at this point, the only question we can possibly have left to ask is this: How imminent is the collapse, and how benevolent (or not) will be the dictator?