Tonight I picked up a book that has been sitting on my shelf for some time, taunting me: Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire. Heather has a crisp, easy to read prose style, lightened by occasional flashes of dry wit. The subject matter is of interest, at least to this old history major. Good book.
There’s a sentence early on (p. 19) that made my mind wander to the stimulus package currently before our own Senate.
Disclaimer: I have a dim view of the stimulus. But I don’t see it as an existential threat to society. Thousands of years from now, when some future historian writes The Fall of the American Empire, I doubt that the word “stimulus” will appear in its pages.
All Congress and the President are doing is slowing down the economy temporarily. A bad thing, yes. The decline of our civilization? No.
Why the connection to Rome’s decline, then? Heather speaks to something that doesn’t change a whole lot across time or space: human decency. His simple, profound sentence reads, “Ancient Roman society held that you should not attempt to control others until you could control yourself.”
Ignore that “Ancient Roman society” part. It doesn’t much matter. The bit about control does. At heart, the stimulus is an assertion of control. That’s why it came to mind so readily. Congress is saying, “we know how to run the economy better than the people do. Therefore we will.”
Yet Congress cannot control itself. President Obama’s hopes for a clean bill have proven futile. Billions of dollars in pork projects are making the stimulus even worse for the economy than a clean version.
Congress really must learn to control itself before it attempts to control others. Decency demands it.
