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> America's going through the the same thing Rome did 1000 of years, and we may lose the republic. // Well, I realized that - what happened in Rome? Rome made a lot of money because it was conquering half the world, and that money was going into Rome, but didn't really just all go to the people. It went to the people running Rome, who were the senators - and just and the same exact thing is happening in America, where of course, there's a lot of money. You know, this is a time of great economic recession, but in the world, no one, no one's getting through it better than America is. America has a lot of money. Yeah. // And what our senators are doing now instead of really running the country and making it as good as it possibly can, they're all manipulating their power: that's exactly what Rome senators did and ultimately how Rome lost it and ended up with a king or a dictator at first. [Interviewer: "So you start seeing the parallels then between..."] Well, I'm not the only one seeing it. Everybody. Yeah. They do Saturday Night Live skits about it
(median income) / (cost of living) is in decline.
It really is the same story, as we would expect it to be. The citizens were replaced by slaves. The middle class was eviscerated. There was no one left to buy the products of slavery. No one left to fill the military ranks. Slaves, petty lords, and starving Romans obviously makes for social instability.
In the modern west, every job that could be outsourced to actual slaves has been done. Some jobs cannot be outsourced, like mining say, so now they're shipping the slaves here. Birth rates are set to plummet because most of the citizens can't even afford to live.
It's like hunting all the Buffalo to extinction until there's nothing left to eat. That's what the owning class is doing. There's no way to stop it because it's a Darwinian system. The owners who are willing to ultimately cannibalize their own economy will win.
> From his perspective, there's no problem on Earth that can't be solved with human ingenuity and creativity. Every major issue we face — wealth inequality, authoritarianism, environmental degradation and so on — could be eradicated if only the system could be fixed first.
Stock market up, what else matters?