Brazil Is the New America: How Brazil Offers Upward Mobility in a Collapsing World by Davidson James Dale

Author:Davidson, James Dale [Davidson, James Dale]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business
ISBN: 9781118006634
Goodreads: 13837705
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-07-31T07:26:00+00:00

Chapter 7

“Rome” Falls, Again

Economic Closure and Financial Repression as the United States Faces Bankruptcy

The menacing specter of state bankruptcy drew ever nearer. The old remedy was prescribed: reduction in the value of the currency and increased taxation. . . . Thus began the fierce endeavor of the State to squeeze the population to the last drop. Since economic resources fell short of what was needed the strong fought to secure the chief share for themselves with the violence and unscrupulousness well in keeping with the origin of those in power. . . .

In these disturbed and catastrophic decades of the third century countless people, especially of the bourgeois middle class, were impoverished, even ruined, and these were precisely the men who had brought into being and maintained the economic prosperity of former times. The wasteful policy of the State, the constant interference with private economic life, and the inflations, amounted to a landslide beneath which a vast amount that was of value was crushed out of existence.

—The Cambridge Ancient History, Volume XI

Collapse may come much more suddenly than many historians imagine. Fiscal deficits and military overstretch suggests that the United States may be the next empire on the precipice. Many nations in history, at the very peak of their power, affluence and glory, see leaders arise, run amok with imperial visions and sabotage themselves, their people and their nation.

—Niall Ferguson, The Rise and Fall of the American Empire

To most people, the idea that we could be approaching the End of America is preposterous. After all, the United States has been the world’s foremost economy for a century. Almost no one now living can recall a time when any country other than the United States was on top of the world. In fact, it requires a good education today to decipher Walter Lippmann’s belief that “what Rome was to the ancient world, what Great Britain has been to the modern world, America is to be to the world of tomorrow.”1

How quickly tomorrow has come and gone. It lasted for a generation or so after World War II, and while it did, American workers were far the most highly compensated people on earth.

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