Doug Casey on the Roman empire

Along with the Greeks, the Romans form the base of Western civilization. We know a lot about Rome now, and they were people exactly like us. And the rise of Rome does in many ways parallel the rise of America. Its rise, its peak - and at this point I think you can even see its decline reflected in the distant mirror of Rome.

We see the same change from a republic to a highly bureaucratized state with tentacles all over the world and great importance placed on the military. The population relying on welfare (after the time of the conquest of Egypt by Caesar, most of the grain and olive oil, the two big commodities of the ancient world, were no longer grown in Italy; they were imported from Africa and given for free, or nearly free, to the people in Rome). Even what went on in the Circus Maximus, the Coliseum, and their many copies in smaller cities, has its parallel in today’s massive football events - not to mention cage fighting and other grisly sports. The big one, of course, is the gradual destruction of the currency.

Quite interesting to me is that in the days of the republic, Roman coins portrayed mythical figures, like gods and goddesses, and ideal concepts. They changed to portraits of the emperor after Caesar.

In the U.S., 1913 - which was a pretty bad year overall, with the initiation of the income tax - was the year the first coin with a dead president’s head on it was introduced, the Lincoln penny. Before then, we only had things like Liberty, Indians, buffaloes, etc. on our coins. Since then, all our coins have had dead emperors on them. We started out with semi-mythic figures like Washington and Jefferson. But now we do the recently dead - Roosevelt, Kennedy, Eisenhower.

It’s simply wrong to put the features of your rulers on the coinage. And the Romans, before Augustus, agreed. And, of course, gold was taken out of daily circulation in 1933, silver in 1965, and copper from the penny in 1982.

Nothing new.

-Doug Casey