FreedomFest 2013 : Are We Rome?

Many historians have warned that the West is going the way of Rome. Rome was the #1 superpower 2000 years ago, and then collapsed. When the British historian Edward Gibbon wrote about “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”in 1776, the British worried that Britain, the #1 Superpower, would lose its dominance in the world…..and it did within a century. Now many experts fear that the United States (and the West in general) are on a road to decline and financial collapse. In 1947, Pulitzer-prize winner H. J. Haskill wrote a book called “New Deal in Old Rome,” making apt comparisons between Rome and the welfare state. Harold Bloom, the famed literary critic at Yale, recently warned, “Twenty-first-century America is in a state of decline. It is scary to reread the final volume of Gibbon these days because the fate of the Roman Empire seems to continue even now. We have approached bankruptcy, foreign wars we cannot pay for, and defrauded our urban and rural poor. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us."