Hilaire Belloc wrote this, in Europe and the Faith (1920) about the fall of the Roman Empire.
All that happened was that Roman civilization having grown very old, failed to maintain that vigorous and universal method of local government subordinated to the capital, which it had for four or five hundred years supported. The machinery of taxation gradually weakened; the whole of central bureaucratic action weakened; the greater men in each locality began to acquire a sort of independence, and sundry soldiers benefited by the slow (and enormous) change, occupied the local "palaces" as they were called, of Roman administration, secured such revenues as the remains of Roman taxation could give them, and, conversely, had thrust upon them so much of the duty of government as the decline of civilization could still maintain. That is what happened, and that is all that happened.
All that happened? Belloc was known for hyperbole and he was busy refuting a false view of history in the wake of World War I. Still, his insight into the murky transition of the Western Roman Empire into the Dark Ages and medievalism is well worth the read, to my mind at least.
Check it out if you have the time. But what's always grabbed my attention is this, The machinery of taxation gradually weakened; the whole of central bureaucratic action weakened; the greater men in each locality began to acquire a sort of independence.
His point being that power began to coalesce into the hands of increasingly wealthy landowners at the expense of central government. Landowners who were effectively exempt from taxation and at the command, he argues, of military force. A small step from that to feudalism, and so to today.
According to Zerohedge and Forbes, Bill Gates in his wisdom has acquired over 200,000 acres of farmland in the US. Likewise, media mogul John Malone owns 2.2 million acres and CNN founder Ted Turner 2 million.
That's a lot of land, which by the way isn't being made anymore, and it doesn't take a vast amount of insight to draw the Roman parallel. Where will it end? Most obviously, to people being villains, serfs and tenant farmers on their billionaire socialist rulers' land. Also to devolution and Balkanization. History evidently rhymes.
Ad maiorem Dei gloriam,
LSP
