Third Party & Independents Archives

Can we please re-consider the balanced budget amendment- I mean, Democrats, you guys see the error of your ways in opposing it now, dont you? In very least, you could make the Republicans seem like a bunch of hypocrites if they change their mind and oppose it.

Haha! Misha, we didn’t need it then. Clinton knew what a veto was for. I guess with these irresponsible “borrow and spend” Republicans in charge, we do.

In fact, Democrats are introducing legislation (Senate bill S.19) to curb spending. The problem will be getting the Republican leadership to care about fiscal responsibility. Remember, they think “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.”

Write your Congresspersons and tell them to co-sponsor or support S.19.

AP- we didnt need it once Clinton lost his Democratic majority… Thats the point- when Congress and the president are divided, we dont need it all that much. When the government’s authority is united under one party, we need it badly. We cant have a statute, we need an constitutional amendment. A statute can be repealed by any majority in congress, so it is toothless…

Misha, it was a bad idea then, and it would be a bad idea now. The Government needs flexibility in budgeting matters to respond to events known and unknown, sometimes with deficit spending.

In principle, passing a law to force people to exercise common sense has never, ever, worked. Look at our speed limit laws on the highways. Congress is a cadre of lawyers, and money is the reelection tool for Congress. It won’t happen, even if it were a good idea, which it is not, since it would hamstring our nation as bad as deficits are now, just in the opposite direction.

Misha, the answer is education of the voters, and voter responsibility to fire those schmucks in the Congress. That is why America is going to go down as a failed experiment in democracy, while other democracies and non-democracies, will likely fair better and longer when all is said and done. The Duopoly Party system has a vested interest in dumbing down the voters and hiding reality behind sophistry and high faluting political rhetoric.

The flaw is America and its people and their love of greed and capitalism and power and winning over all else. Not the absence of a balanced budget amendment. It is a values thing, and we just don’t have the right ones anymore.

Misha, in principle, I agree. But I live in California. We have a balanced budget directive in the state constitution. We also have an $8 billion budget deficit, and we had to take out a $14 billion loan to cover last year.

Having a balanced budget amendment isn’t the answer. It’s going to require dedication to fiscal responsibility.

David,

America is going down as a failed Democracy? New to the site, but isn’t that a bit pessimistic? The current system has flaws but at least it allows for self critiquing and corrections.

Voters can’t be dumbed down unless they let themselves be dumbed down.

Nothing in history spells the demise of a nation more surely than overreaching economically and militarily. From Babylon to the USSR, Ancient Rome to the British Empire.

Our economic future is looking grimmer by the year, and our military is overextended. Either by conquest or internal collapse of order and lack of commitment to the system, the double punch always brings the big ones down. Too pessimistic? Not if the voters don’t put a stop to government’s visions of grandeur as world superpower and its myopic focus on the short term return. And I see nothing in our leaders in government to instill any confidence that this ship of state is altering that course.

Misha,

And what happen the first time Congress and the President exceed the limit and don’t pass a balanced budget? I am with AP and David on this, a Balanced Budget Amendment is not what is needed, what is needed is leadership, common sense, (informed) voter participation and fiscal constraint.

I disagree. Nothing in history spells the demise of a nation more surely than the oppression of its own citizens. Those examples you give are of empires that grew through military conquest, oppressed their people and none were true democracies.

And though the twin deficits may be significant, the economy is actually producing jobs and growing earnings and moderate inflation at best.

What other democracies or non-democracies have a brighter future??

Smithy,

Thos who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and only the smug and arrogant (re: current occupants of White House), disregard history’s lessons at their peril. I share David’s dire assessment of the state of our Union. We are losing our Republic little by little election by election, and the average citizen is too busy shopping at Wal-Mart to notice, or care.

And I disagree; voters can be and are dumped down by their own apathy, inattention, and ignorance (of current events and the workings of their own government), and failure to heed the lesson of history. This past election proves that point rather starkly.

Smithy,

Surely there are those who would argue that the average Roman was not oppressed but apathetic, and others would argue that the end of the British Empire was brought about by over-reaching and economic stress and not through the oppression of the British populace.

How long can America sustain its current standard of living if the mean wage is going down? Yes the economy is producing jobs, but of what caliber? I do not see America’s future as bright. And answer to your question: in case you haven’t noticed, the Chinese are waxing even as we wane; they are not now called the world’s factory for nothing. And I do believe the fortunes of the Brazilians look bright. After all they now produce more Orange Juice and soybeans then the U.S. and are fast catching up in other areas. Japan is also shinning as is South Korea, and most of Western Europe. Of course there is also Singapore and Malaysia, not to mention India (getting the lions share of U.S. high tech jobs or haven’t you heard?), and Ireland.

My point is they can only dumb down themselves which seems to be what you are saying as well. You can’t dumb someone down if they aren’t a willing participant.

Don’t underestimate the # of people who disagree with this administration, including members of their own party.

But even though we see the mistakes and the misrepresentations more clearly than most, don’t give up hope that it can be changed. No other system allows for a change like ours as flawed and corrupt as it is.

Would anyone rather live in any other system of government?

Edward,

You want to be a worker in a Chinese factory? Neither will they before long.

Japan’s economy has been down and out for nearly two decades and is only now recovering as they embrace many of the standards that we advised them to adopt for their financial institutions. Their overnight fed funds rate is .25%.

And while I respect many of the growth opportunities of the other economies you mention, many only exist because of the extremely low wages offered to those workers.

Again do you wish to work in a call center in India? Neither will they before long.

We could debate economic data every which way, but the fundamental economic structures are far stronger in the US than any region you mention.

I thought the discussion was regarding the US as a failed experiment in democracy not sustaining our standard of living.

Smithy,

I will not argue that the American Republic is probably the best system yet devised by man to govern himself, how ever the system is only as good as those charged with care and feeding. We—the American people as a whole—are failing the system by our lack of understanding of it. Even those charged representing our interests those who have studied the law and our Constitution seek to subvert it for personal and political gain at the expense of the Republic.

One only has to look at the recently passed USA Patriot Act, Medicare Bill, and the failed Energy Bill, and Patients Bill of Rights as proof that the interests of the American people are no longer at the center of legislative agenda’s. Further proof can be found in public figure once again trying to introduce God into the public sphere, and the current move to insert discrimination into the federal and state constitutions limiting the Liberty of a whole class of people based on religious belief, thereby subverting the law and our constitutional principles. The People, in short are ignorant to the true meaning of freedom and equality, and that leads to tyranny, which spells the end of the Republic as we know it; think Rome as she transitioned from a Republic to a dictatorship.

I have live abroad and wouldn’t mind doing so again. I could live quite comfortably in Canada, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Belgium, Spain, France, Denmark, Switzerland, Italy, etc.

You seemed to have missed my pint about China et.al. We are losing jobs to those countries that have traditionally fueled the American middle class. You don’t honestly think that service sector jobs will fill the wage earning shoes of high tech and factory jobs do you? As wages keep getting lower and the tax base continues to shrink, how much longer will we be able to claim the mantle of the world largest economy? We arte heading towards a two class society; is that okay with you?

So China’s economy isn’t strong and growing stronger by the day? Almost everything you buy these days is made there, from toys at McDonalds to television sets at Best Buy, to laptop computer emblazoned with names like HP and Dell. You cell phone and cell phone batteries, toasters and even large appliances. The writing is one the wall for all to see.

The defecit a percentage of GDP is 3.6% and going down. Total debt is remaining stable. Debt is a problem. We should cut some programs and we must address Social Security, but comparions are in order. Since WSJ is a premium site, I can’t link, but please see below from today’s paper on total debt.

Even at 38.6% of GDP in 2006, debt held by the public would remain well below the 49.4% level hit in 1993, the most recent peak year. And it would also be well below the general government debt burden in Germany (51.9% of GDP), France (42.7%) and especially spendthrift Japan (79.3%), according to statistics from Bear, Stearns & Co. Compared with other industrial nations, in short, the U.S. is in strong fiscal shape

McDonald’s toys, what the hell!!

The next thing to leave will be BMW, Mercedes, Honda, Toyota, and Nissan assembly plants.

Smitty said: “I disagree. Nothing in history spells the demise of a nation more surely than the oppression of its own citizens. Those examples you give are of empires that grew through military conquest, oppressed their people and none were true democracies.”

Thank you for saving me the time of reading any more of your responses. Greece was a true democracy, and the first. Did Rome not have a Senate representing the people, and did they not have power even over the emperor for a lengthy period of time? Read some history bub, learn something before spouting away like someone with a fed exed internet puchased 99.95 Ph.D.

I earned my degree with A’s and B’s the hard way, learning what was being taught and more that wasn’t required. You obviously have little to no historical knowledge of the Ancient civilizations I mentioned and I find your pontificating ignorance in a public forum shameless.

You say “Nothing in history…”. Try qualifying that with nothing in history that you ever read, being extremely little, said to your level of comprehension that democracy existed before. Truth is, it did, and thanks to the Rennaisance and centuries of church scribes detailing the history of Greece and Rome, our fore fathers had a road map for the government you live under today.

You must think democracy was an American invention like gunpowder, the printing press, and wine. You are a true blue American and that is why this country has such few and dimming options to remain the greatest nation, economy, and government built on freedom. Americans have become a nation of specialists delegating everything from raising their children, caretaking their souls, investing their money, to political pundits and parties to do their thinking for them. Most Americans don’t/won’t take the time to broaden their general liberal education in the humanities, arts, history, social and political science, and thus depend on their pundits to tell them what to think about any given policy or program in our society. That is pathetic for a democracy. The first rule of democracy our Founding Fathers knew, is that it will only work with an educated and informed consent of the public.

Hence their restriction of voting to white male land owners. White males, because they were by far the most educated. And land owners because having a real estate asset assured that, in the majority, land owners would stay informed of the actions of government for fear of losing that land and entitlement to it by those corrupted by power in government.

Appreciate your volunteering to demonstrate my point.

Thank You David! Thank you for that wonderful illustration of liberal arrogance. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy about ‘08.

This is my favorite part:

“Read some history bub, learn something before spouting away like someone with a fed exed internet puchased 99.95 Ph.D.

I earned my degree with A’s and B’s the hard way, learning what was being taught and more that wasn’t required. You obviously have little to no historical knowledge of the Ancient civilizations I mentioned and I find your pontificating ignorance in a public forum shameless. “

No one cares what piece of paper hangs on your wall, or how many fancy letters you put on a business card. I feel bad for you that wasted some valuable years of your life getting that piece of paper.

“Nothing in history spells the demise of a nation more surely than overreaching economically and militarily. From Babylon to the USSR, Ancient Rome to the British Empire.”

Let me see, Babylon, USSR, Ancient Rome, British Empire, I can’t find Anicent Greece anywhere mentioned in this post. In fact I don’t even think these are nations, aren’t they empires? You attack Smitty for not mentioning Greece in his response. He did not mention it, because you did not mention it. He did not mentioned how the Cherokee Nation fell either, or how the Anglo Saxons lost to the Normans.

The fact is that some nations met their demise by reaching too far militarily and economically and some by oppressing their own people. Some nations may have had a combination of the two. Some nations just ran into dudes with bigger guns.

There are many reasons that nations fold up shop, many of them are random. One surefire way to fold is to piss off the big dog (The United States of America). Ask the USSR, Taliban, Saddam, Nazis, etc. Surely the Taliban would still be in power today if there did not harbor Al Qaeda. One could hardly say they were reaching too far militarily, although they were certainly oppressing their people. When the big dog woke up from being poked with a stick, the Taliban just happen to be in the way.

The Greek city-state Athens had a democracy for a short time. Some lesser states also did, from time to time. But most of Greece was ruled by oligarchies for most of the classical period. Greek democracy was extremely unstable and ephemeral.

Rome was a republic, but not in the sense we talk about it. Senators were senators because of their family or appointment. They were not elected in any modern sense. The Roman Republic was unstable because it depended on the virtue of the individuals running it. That is one of the reasons it fell and was replaced by the emperors. The Senate never had an effective check on the emperors.

You really can’t speak of ancient Rome without specifying the period. The Roman Republic lasted about 509-27BC and went through many different organizations. The Empire endured from 27BC until AD 476 in the West and until 1453 in the East. There was never a “Greece” in ancient times. There were city-states, leagues of cities and Hellenistic kingdoms. You can’t talk about ancient Greece without specifying the period and the place. Much of “Greek” history happen outside the borders of today’s Greece. Any comparison to Greece or Rome in a general sense is uniformed.

What all ancient experiments with democracy lacked were the institutions of government. It is not surprising that since they were working by trial and error and we now have the benefit of their experience.

Smitty is right to say that the United States was a first – novus ordo seclorum – a new order of the ages. It was a synthetic country with our constitution consciously and rationally based on precedent, ancient and modern and developed from the British traditions of rights. They understood the weaknesses of each type of government and combined the aspects of democracy, oligarchy and monarchy to produce a stable country ruled with the consent of the governed.

The founders well understood that no democracy up until that time had lasted more than a couple generations at most and that no democracy had every held sway over a large area. It was a radical experiment. In 1787 there were essentially no democracies in the world (the possible exception was the Swiss Confederacy depending on your definition). Now most countries in the world at least aspire to be democracies.

The founding fathers tried to set up a system that did not rely on the virtue of individuals, which they identified as the weakness of democracy and republics. It is to a remarkably degree self-correcting. People can argue whether or not the American system is the best system ever devised by man, but it certainly is one of the most stable and adaptive. It has existed for 217 years under the same constitution absorbed the changing from an underdeveloped country of just over three million to a superpower with nearly 300 million people. The U.S. is the second oldest continuous government currently in existence. The oldest are the Brits.

Ours is a unique system. It resembles Greek politics in some ways, because it has Greek roots. If you want to see Roman architecture come to Washington. Concepts of rights can be traced to England. So when you compare the U.S. to the Greeks, Romans or British Empire you can find parallels. But all comparisons are incomplete.

One example of an incomplete comparison that immediately comes to mind is that none of those empires ran up a $450 billion dollar spending deficit every year.

Thats the point- when Congress and the president are divided, we dont need it all that much. When the government’s authority is united under one party, we need it badly.

Misha,

Dude, I told you if you wanted to control the deficit you should vote for Kerry (there being no chance of the Democrats regaining the House and Senate). But did you listen to me? Noooooooooo. ;)

I for one don’t think that the Dems should champion fiscal responsibility. Why should they clean up the mess created by Republicans? They should address their constituents’ problems. That’s what works for the Republicans. (It may seem like I’m contradicting myself, but I simply don’t believe that the GOP would have let Kerry be as reckless as George, no matter what stance he took.)

I love the way Peter and Jack acknowledge the correctness of America’s democratic roots in Rome and Greece as a way of disagreeing with my contention of the same.

Jack said: “The U.S. is the second oldest continuous government currently in existence. The oldest are the Brits.”

That is not saying much considering more distant nations and civilizations and governments lasted much longer. The Ancient Egyptians system has longevity Americans should aspire to.

For me, the point of the history of nations, empires, etc. is that regardless of bounty, regardless, of design, regardless of wealth, regardless of numbers of peoples, they all failed. Jack, you acknowledge that the American system was an experiment. I agree. And it is still being tested for viability. A couple hundred years makes for a very short experiment in civilization and regime. If America is still the greatest nation on earth in another 3 hundred years, she will begin to compete with some of history’s nations and empires with real longevity.

Jack said: ” Any comparison to Greece or Rome in a general sense is uniformed.”

What an absurd comment, in light of the hundreds if not thousands of books by historians making that comparison “in a general sense”.

Roman civilization as you point out lasted many, many centuries. It is absurd also to stipulate that because the civilization reinvented itself along its continuum, that somehow that continuum did not exist. Of course ancient empires, nations, and states adapted and evolved, it is the nature of human creativity and adaptability to make that it so.

I love Peter’s line: “Thank You David! Thank you for that wonderful illustration of liberal arrogance.”

If you can’t debate it rationally, just call it liberal. History is in the books. Ancient history is neither liberal nor conservative in any sense relating to American politics today, Peter. Thank for that deft response from the right.

Jack is quite correct in his recount of the Greek city states which were prevented from being a unified national entity by the terrain of land around the Aegean Sea, resulting in at best, a loose cooperation among city states due to the mountainous physical barriers that were surmounted by and large only by sea. And it was the unpredictability of the Aegean Sea which sank ships that caused the kind of inquiry that developed into Greek knowledge and wisdom evident in the writings of Plato and Aristotle.

Commerce between the city states and beyond was highly problematic due to the sudden and ferocious storms that arose in the Aegean. Attempts to understand weather and to safeguard commerce in ways other than the personalities of the Gods (which weren’t very predictable) fostered a kind of empiricism and rules of inquiry and conclusion which in turn resulted in an evolution of human thinking and empirical inquiry so remarkable, it was respected and copied and translated centuries after the Conquest of the Ancient Greece. Many of our forefathers were students of the classics of Ancient Greece and Rome, hence the direct lineage and adoption of some of the basic constructs of government from Ancient Greece and Rome.

Anyone who finds history and effusion of arrogance, liberal or otherwise, is as they say, condemned to repeat it.

AP, that is not quite correct. Rome did in fact run up debts that were unsustainable through taxation which in part accounted for its loss of empire. When Rome began bribing Goths and others to not attack outreaches of the empire, they created an avalanche of rebel leaders desiring to create enough rebellion and insurrection in the extended territories in hopes of being bribed into wealthy position and status as well. It was a snowball rolling down the mountain that ultimately became unaffordable both from a militaristic and economic viewpoint.

Woody said: “I for one don’t think that the Dems should champion fiscal responsibility.”

But, fiscal responsibility is in the best interest of Democrat’s constituents. Pay as you Go is a platform issue, Democrats had better hold on to. Without it, the Democrats have no fiscal policy.

I have to be pedantic here.

Ancient history was my first love. I studied Greek and Latin and visited Rome and Constantinople (Istanbul) to see the remains. You just can’t make parallels to the general situation of Greece and Rome.

Those many books that do make a comparison either compare the U.S. to a particular point in Roman or Greek history, or are rotten books. There is continuity, but also great change. If someone says that the U.S. is like the Roman Empire, you have to ask when. If someone says the U.S. is like the Greeks, you have to ask when and in which city state or Hellensistic Empire. Nobody who understood the history would do otherwise, except as a sweeping and non scholarly statement.

Rome has about a thousand years of history in the West and hung on another thousand years in the East (in very altered form). Which period and place makes all the difference. As you rightly point out, the U.S. is still very young. How much sense would it make to draw a comparison between, for example, the American economy and the European economy if you didn’t specify a time period? None at all.

The Romans, for example, often ran what we would today call a budget deficit. They repeatedly debased their currency. At some points in their history, they established wage and price controls. The long history of the Roman Republic and Empire provide a variety of lessons of decline and renewal, success and failure.

Historians still argue about the causes of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Last I heard, there still was no consensus, except that there were lots of reasons.

Finally about American Democracy. The roots of U.S. democracy are in Greece and Rome, but the road from then to now is not straight. Many cultures trace roots to the Greeks and Romans. This includes not only the U.S., but also all of Western Europe and Latin America. I was surprised when I lived in Brazil how much of the society resembled Roman forms and of course Latin Americans speak a language directly descended from Latin, (unlike out “Germanic” English). Russia and even much of the Islamic world also have roots in classical antiquity. They have produced very different societies and cultures.

U.S. democracy depending on ancient roots, but the flowers come from the enlightenment and from English practices, and the fruit was developed right here in America. U.S. practice developed many of the aspect of what we call democracy now. The Roman and the Greeks would recognize the basic form, but have no concept of the details. It has evolved differently. It is like a homo erectus facing a modern man, same family, different results.

Jack said: “If someone says that the U.S. is like the Roman Empire, you have to ask when. If someone says the U.S. is like the Greeks, you have to ask when and in which city state or Hellensistic Empire.”

Jack, but I did stipulate to the Senate of Rome prior to the time (I forget which one) the emperor declared hiself God and dispensed with any obligation to be governed by the Senate. I also stipulated to the height of the Democratic process of Ancient Greece, though I did not stipulate the years, you well know that I was referring to the Golden Age of Greece through the period of Plato and Aristotle prior to the Spartans being vanquished. I.E. from about 550 BC to around 350 BC.

Nobody who understood the history would do otherwise, except as a sweeping and non scholarly statement.

I do understand history and did otherwise in a fashion making the above remark invalid.

If you think Athen’s Golden Age occured in a vacuum without the the couple hundred years prior as context in the areas of sea commerce and desire to insure (literally create insurance policies for shipping) and the building of inter-city/state cooperation and specialization, then your understanding of history is in question.

The parallels between the Greeks specialization and their utter dependence on a small number of Spartans to defend against invasion and America’s utter dependence upon specialization and parallel incapacity to anticipate and accomodate long term multi-disciplinary solutions to threats facing the nation may be overlooked by some historians, but, modern philosophers like Nikhil Bhattacharya and Andrew Bjelland, both professors of philosophy with whom I studied philosophy, found them unavoidable.

Jack said: “The Roman and the Greeks would recognize the basic form, but have no concept of the details.”

Duh!!!! A few million innovations in technology and modern thought over 2000 years will have that effect. Yes. The roots are still to be found in the classic GrecoRoman writings from which many of our founding fathers were schooled and educated. That was the point, wasn’t it. America did not invent democracy. And former democratic attempts at government failed. Ergo, America’s Republican form of democracy is an experiment without any historical guarantees of longevity or success.

Overextended economic and military reach have brought down other great civilizations, and there is little historical evidence to support the idea that the U.S. is immune to such consequences of overextension.

Pride goth before the fall…and arrogance blinds the wearer to the dangers of complacency. David is right, the Founding Fathers did not invent democracy, they improved upon the model. Like a marriage, societies need constant care of they will fail. Rome and Greece aside, our form of democracy—representative—relies upon the representative to do what is in the best interest of the country. It is hard to pinpoint when Washington DC stopped working for all American, but the shift is self-evident. Only the willfully blind or ignorant refuse to see the signs of representative demise.

Like it or not we are a nation showing all the signs of being in decline. We won the Cold War, but at what cost to ourselves? We are no longer a collective, one people striving towards a central goal. We are instead almost 300 million individuals out to better ourselves without regard to our fellows. We hold up religious doctrine as if were law, but refuse to live our lives by its dictates. The spirit we worship by-and-large is painted green. In search of the lowest price for things we really don’t need, we have sold our collective souls to the Wal-Mart.

And to line our own pockets, we are willing to accept soaring budget deficits, instead of shouting in unison that in a time of War, tax cut should not even be considered. Are we as a society spiraling into dysfunction? I say yes. I read the signs of history’s making and I cannot ignore the writing. But even as we fall, this short lived experiment in human self-governance will be etched in the pages of history. We ignore the mileposts of history at our peril; a society so immersed in ignorance cannot long endure, and a house divided cannot stand…

We really are getting onto shaky historical grounds.

The Greeks never had anything like insurance. The idea that you could spread risk or even assess risk at all is a modern innovation made possible only by probability theories developed in the starting in the 17th Century. Remember also that calculus and statistics are fairly modern inventions. The Greek number system sucked. They could solve problems based on geometry, but Pythagoras himself would not have been able to pass an eight-grade math test that included any probability, statistics, or algebra. Without those tools, you can’t have an insurance system.

“Golden Age of Greece through the period of Plato and Aristotle prior to the Spartans being vanquished. I.E. from about 550 BC to around 350 BC.”

I assume you mean when Epaminondos and the Thebans vanquished the Spartans. That points to the problem of talking about Greece. Which cities? The Spartans were vanquished by other Greeks, just as the Spartans vanquished the Athenians by allying with the Persians or enslaved their fellow Greek Messeneans. Most people when the talk of the glories of Greece, are really thinking only of Athens under Pedicles. This was a short and not typical time.

“their utter dependence on a small number of Spartans to defend against invasion” again, this is very specific. The Spartans actually only fought invaders during a particular 1½ year period and even then only in alliance with the Athenians. Most of the other times they were just practicing war, murdering civilians among their subject populations or fighting other Greeks. The Spartans had no part in the most famous Greek battle – Marathon. They arrived too late. The problem with Spartans is that they didn’t like to leave home so they missed many big battles. The Athenians with some others but no Spartans defeated the Persians at Salamis, which sent the Persian Emperor Xerxes packing, and Mycale, which ended the Persian threat for a while.

One thing that people always get wrong about the period is to assume there was country called Greece and/or that Greeks cooperated. Even during the Persian Wars, a majority of Greeks remained neutral or actually sided with the Persians and even the heroic Spartans made deals with the Persians to defeat their fellow Greeks.

Talking about Greece for the period from 550-350 is like generalizing about Europe from 1750-1950. You can do it, but you have to specify whether you mean Russia, France, Germany or England and whether the year is 1763, or 1815, 1914 or 1945. You get the point.

Greece never achieved anything like the integration that Europe experienced even before the EU. There were Greeks. They spoke a similar language and many lived in what is now Greece, but they also lived all around the Mediterranean. They were loyal to their own city-states, not to Greece. Besides the Byzantine successor to the Roman Empire, there never was any political entity run by Greeks that governed the place that is now Greece until 1820.

That is the problem of using history and you can see why I don’t think it is a particularly good idea to speak in general terms.

One more historical tidbit. Just about every Roman Emperor called himself a god or was deified soon after his death. Being called a god didn’t mean the same thing to them as it does to us.

We can learn from history, but we need to look at the sweep and the constant change. Thing do not grow out of other things in logical ways. It is not like democracy in Greece was a child that grew into democracy in America. In many real and important ways, the democracy we have in America was invented in America. That is why the cultures I mentioned from Vancouver to Vladivostok that have the same classical roots are so different today.

V. Edward

Americans have rarely been particularly cohesive in the sense you are talking about. We look back at the period between 1945 and about 1970 and think that was the normal state of affairs when actually it was an anomaly. Read some of the things their opponents wrote about Washington, Jefferson or Lincoln when they were presidents.

Jack, now you are arguing without information and using ignorance to support your argument. The Greeks did in fact attempt to share risk on commerce on the Aegean, the documentation and references have been there for a long time. Shared risk from a financial point of view DOES NOT require calculus or statistics.

What the Greeks did was replace single shipper payloads on self owned ships. Multiple merchants shared each other’s ships and shipped only partial shiploads on each ship. Through this methodology, they insured each other that if ONE ship went down, the loss of the entire ship load was shared by multiple merchants, instead of a single merchant losing an entire shipload of his own merchandise. It is not clear to what degree shared ownership of the ships themselves was created, but, there was reciprocal shared useage of the ships that very possibly led to shared ownership of the ships, though verification shared ownership of the ships had not been documented as of 1981.

They did however create insurance on cargoes by virtue of sharing the cost of losses. No, it is not the insurance system we have today, but, it was an insurance system based on shared transportation as opposed to shared monetary pooling. The Aegean Sea’s storms in 600 BC were a central motivator in the development of empirical methodology for very practical reasons. If they could discover how and why the storms arose on the Aegean, they might be able to predict when they would occur and thus avoid the losses to merchants and shippers. While they never did establish reliable methods of predicting storms on the Aegean, it did lead to shared risks for shippers and cooperative use of ships as a method of sharing and reducing the impact of a loss of a ship on the Aegean. Burke has even documented this arrangement as I recall in his program “Connections”.

Jack said: “I assume you mean when Epaminondos and the Thebans vanquished the Spartans.”

No, I am referring to Phillip of Macedonia defeating Spartans who were the hired army of many of the Greek city states in charge of defense. Look, this is what I refer to when I speak of specialization. If all the Greek merchants and polticians had banded together to defend against Phillip, Phillip would never have taken control of the Greek city states. It was precisely because of the taxing system which permitted politicians and merchants to pay the Spartans for defense, that lulled them into a false sense of security when Phillip spread his empire southward. I can imagine a call going out, ‘The Macedonians are Coming’ and politicians and merchants responding by saying, “hell, I paid my taxes, they support the Spartans, that is their job to fight Phillip, I have a business meeting at 1 PM and my daughter has a party this afternoon. Let the Spartans do what they were paid to do”.

If the people had not specialized their society to the extent that self-defense was relegated to a grossly numerically inferior army of Spartans, Phillip may have been turned back by the masses of residents of all the city-states in a common defense of their way of life. But, that did not happen, the Spartans had not a chance against Phillip’s ‘porcupline lance formations’ which divided their already inferior numbers around 338 BC. And Phillip did not seek to burn and pillage but simply forced the city-states to choose between fighting or acknowledging him as their leader. Given the commerce and trade, appointments and busy schedules, the Greeks acceded to Phillips request rather then fight for their independence themselves, saying, I am a cobbler, not a soldier, I am a roofer, not a soldier, I am bread maker, not a soldier, etc.

BTW, before you accuse others of ignorance based on your own, ask them their source. Below is one source for my contention about insurance development in Ancient Greece:

A BRIEF HISTORY OF HAZARD INSURANCE

[note: read the whole passage but, note the mention of Ancient Greece in the third paragraph]

Long before the development of insurance as such, early civilizations evolved various kinds of insurance-like devices for transferring or sharing risk. For example, early trading merchants are believed to have adopted the practice of distributing their goods among various boats, camels, and caravans, so each merchant would sustain only a partial loss of his goods if some of the boats were sunk or some of the camels and caravans were plundered. This concept survives today in the common insurance practice of avoiding over-concentration of properties in any one area, and by spreading risk through reinsurance arrangements.

We can trace to the Code of Hammurabi in 1950 B.C., the practice of bottomry, whereby the owner of a ship binds the ship as security for the repayment of money advanced or lent for the journey. If the ship is lost at sea the lender loses the money, but if the ship arrives safely, he receives with the loan repayment the premium specified in advance, which is higher than the legal rate of interest. Bottomry, one of the oldest forms of insurance, was used throughout the ancient world (Covello and Mumpower, 1985).

By 750 B.C. the practice of bottomry was highly developed, particularly in ancient Greece, with risk premiums reflecting the danger of the venture. Mutual insurance also developed at this time, whereby all parties to the contract shared in any loss suffered by one of the traders who paid a premium. The decay and disintegration of the Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D. was followed by the development of small, isolated, self-sufficient, and self-contained communities. Since international commerce practically ceased, there was little need for sophisticated risk-sharing devices such as insurance. However, with the revival of international commerce in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the use of insurance-type mechanisms resumed (Pfeffer, 1966). In England, the establishment of Lloyd’s Coffee House in 1688 (the beginnings of ”Lloyd’s of London”) provided a gathering place for individual marine underwriters (Covello and Mumpower, 1985). London then became the center of the global marine insurance market.

David

I read classical Greek. I studied Thucydides, Herodotus Xenophon, Polybius and Arrian in Greek. I also read Plato in Greek. I wrote my masters thesis on the reforms of Solon and studies Aristotle’s history of the Athenian Constitution as a source. I have read scores of modern books about various aspects of Greek history. It has been more than 25 years since I formally studied Greek and Greek history, but I didn’t forget that much and I still read on the subject when I get time. I recently (last year) reread Thucydides (this time in translation, I really can’t do Greek anymore.) along with Kagan’s Peloponnesian War. So my sources are both original and modern. I might be wrong, but I am not ignorant.

I don’t recognize the Greece you describe.

The Thebans broke spartan power before Phillip of Macedonia. Some Spartans fought as mercenaries in other Greek city state armies, but none depended on them. By the time of Phillip, the population of Sparta was too low to supply many troops to anyone. But Phillip defeated the Greeks by defeating the Thebans and the Athenians. He never bothered to subjugate Sparta. There was a famous exchange involving the word “if.” So, ironically the Spartans were the only Greeks not included.

You are still having the problem understanding the Greek states when you say “Phillip may have been turned back by the masses of residents of all the city-states in a common defense of their way of life.” At no time in classical antiquity did all the Greeks get together to do anything at all. Greeks were NOT a country until 1820. They were never united. Thinking of Greece as a country is an anachronism. Many of the Greeks were happy to have Phillip take over. Why do you think the famous orator Demosthenes had to make speeches against Phillip? Because people in his own city – Athens – were in favor of accommodating him. He represented the way of life they wanted.

You are right about pooling risk. It is not the same as insurance, but I take your point. However it is not the key thing in Greek history. One of my friends used to claim that the introduction of the chicken in the 7th Century BC was the big paradigm shift in Greece. It changed the diet. All these details are important, but they do not set the character of the country.

Jack, we apparently are operating off most of the same history data, but, viewing it differently. As I described, the mountains, prevented direct interaction between the city-states, except by sea. But, there was a great deal of cooperation and influence shared among the city states. That is well documented. The fact that the US has different states with even different cultures in various regions does not negate the fact that there is a lot of common culture.

I already acknowledged the mountains as barriers and apparently you failed to recognize that your data set was the same as mine regarding city -states vs. monlithic national identity. But, you learned the differences, I learned many of the differences and many aspects of life shared over time among the people of the city - states, which permits me to acknowledge Ancient Greece as an entity and culture distinctly different from all others. That’s fine. You are right about the differences. But, you really should look for the shared as well to get a more complete understanding. Commerce was the unifying activity among the city - states, and that commerce, as in all of history, permits shared culture, ideas, inventions, and technologies. A fact you seem bent on refusing to acknowledge about Ancient Greece.

And your view of democracy in the city-states is refuted by a large number of historians citing historical evidence which indicates though oligarchies and aristocracies did arise in a number of the city-states, most of them were replaced either through conquest by other city-states or revolution by the citizens at one point or another, and democracy was a spreading and predominant form of government in a large number of the city-states. I agree there was no single national identity, under one flag. But you seem to keep trying to measure history by the present which distorts history.

It is appropriate to view the present through the lens of history which adds dimension, clarity, and continuity to understanding the present. But your insistence that because democratic elements of the city states were not replicas of American or modern democracy, means they did not have democracy is a fundamental flaw in your understanding of history. Democracy was born in Greece, and revived in modern times with of course, many additions, modifications, and alterations to accomodate modern times. But, that does not negate the democratic systems and functions found in many Ancient Greek city/states.

And your credentials may in fact be a problem. Specialists abound in this country who believe by virtue of credentials they know more than anyone else and thus stop learning from the research and investigation and interpretations of others.

So it appears in our discussion, that you are unwilling to learn from anyone without a Ph.D. after their name and whom you personally respect. That is one of the negatives about a specialized workforce in society. Rather than ask what is my source for my statements, you immediately jump to the conclusion that you know it all, anything I say on the subject that is not in accordance with your limited learning (all historical learning is limited), cannot be true, and therefore, you refute knowledge you have not yet grasped. That is a blindness of specialization and not uncommon in specialized societies.

This is a phenomena Carla Fiorini understands (also a student of history and philosophy) and why she created a corporate culture that focused on breaking down barriers of expertise and the limitations of vision and understanding that comes from credentialed experitise. There is no expert that cannot learn from non-experts if their minds are open and their creative mind active in the listening process.

History is not static. The more evidence that is uncovered the more history changes to accomodate that new evidence. I am sure you have read all those writers, and books, but, that in no way impies you have read them all or even most. And thus there are aspects of that history which you can still be educated about, if you are truly a student of history. If though, you are an expert, then there is nothing further that you can learn from others and that is a sad state for a historian. For when it comes to history, there is very little original thought by experts. Just original interpretations that link this archeological evidence to that, or this excerpt to that event, etc.

We know a lot about those times, but, there is still a huge volume of discovery going on and I know of no one, who is capable of assimilating it all into first hand experience of the times. Ask an underwriter if insurance was a part of Ancient Greek history.. their reply will surprise you. One does not get an underwriting license without knowing the history of insurance and that goes back to Ancient Greece. Apparently you did not read the third paragraph of my citation carefully. The Greeks evolved bottomry to the basic principles of insurance as we know it today.

I gave you the evidence of insurance from other noted authorities, and you in your specialized credentialed mindset, refute it. The American Insurance literature also cites insurance as founded in Ancient Greece, whence came the term ‘UnderWriter’. Insurance, premiums paid by many to cover loss by a few was documented in Ancient Greek culture. But, if you wish to refute it that is fine. Without evidence to the contrary however, it says something to me about the objectivity and empirical training lent to this debate.

David

I am no longer (never really was) a specialist on ancient Greece and I never finished my PhD (the job market for ancient historians in constrained, so I went the very unspecialized MBA route). Excuse me if I gave the impression that I was trying to stifle debate by citing credentials. My intent was to demonstrate that I was not approaching the subject from a position of ignorance, as you wrote about me.

You can look at history or any situation from a variety of perspectives. I respect ancient Greek contributions to democracy and that is one of the things that initially attracted me to the field. But as I looked more closely at the totality of Greek civilization, I found that democracy was an isolated and short-lived phenomenon in Greece. Most Greek states never attained democracy at all and even those that did didn’t have it for most of their history. Athens, the cradle of democracy, is a good case study in the triumphs and tragedies.

What I took from the study of Greek democracy was that it was very fragile and prone to excess. Without checks and balances, it resembled mob rule and hit the rocks quickly and disastrously. The Athenian experience with democracy during their war with Sparta put people off the whole concept for nearly 2000 years. Aristotle talked about a mixed constitution, one that included elements of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. The framers of the U.S. Constitution, with the experience of history as a guide, created a mixed constitution, consciously drawing on examples from Athens, Sparta and Rome, and many others, trying to incorporate the strength and minimize the weaknesses. They acknowledged their debt to the ancients, but from the component parts created something unique. Hence the motto still on our dollar bill: novus ordo seclorum.

I believe we all can learn from history, but direct comparisons between things ancient and modern are very tricky. History does not repeat itself and we can easily take more from a lesson than it has to teach. As Mark Twain says, a cat that sits on a hot stove will never again sit on a hot stove, but he never will sit on a cool one either.

P.S. about insurance, here again we are talking about a matter of degrees. When does something evolve into something else? The example I gave in a slightly different context was Homo erectus and modern man. At what point in a continuum do you say that they are different species?

You might enjoy an interesting book about risk and the development of mathematics of probability called Against the Gods by Peter Bernstein.

Jack said: “My intent was to demonstrate that I was not approaching the subject from a position of ignorance, as you wrote about me.”

My reference to ignorance was in regard to insurance and the large number of city-states which achieved democratic decision making at various points in their history before the Macedonian invasion. It was obvious from our debate that you are well read and versed in a great deal of the history of that time and area. I did not mean to imply ignorance in any general way about Ancient Greek history.

We are in total agreement about democracy being short-lived. A 150 to 200 years is a short span for a type of government. Though, given the 35 year life span, it does reflect more than 2 or 3 generations. And it was a work in progress, developing as opposed to our relatively fixed Constititutional constructs.

Where we may well disagree is the viability of democracy. I raised the issue of specialized credentialed expertise, for this purpose as well. Democracy depends upon a citizenry educated and informed. In a specialized society of experts, that broad based education and current affairs level of awareness essential to democracy is threatened. We see it today with Religious experts debating Scientific experts over the evolution, social and behavioral causes of things like unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, and even the Constitutional intent of the Establishment Clause.

Concensus is becoming harder to come by in our republican democracy, and specialization of expertise leads directly to factionalization of policy and law without concensus by a majority of the public. It also leads to such divergent interpretations of the same data sets of information like the future of SS, that concensus becomes a casualty of all that expertise.

An educated and informed consent of the people is prerequisite for a democracy to anticipate and resolve both short and especially, long term social, political and economic problems facing the people. But, like the Ancient Greeks, Athenians and Spartans for example, concensus in the US is becoming very hard to come by and thus, so is cooperation and mutual benefit.

The topic of this article, the budget deficit is a perfect example. There is no concensus as to whether the national debt at these levels is a threat or not. One side argues ratio to GDP and says it is not historically high. The other side argues the global economic and trade balance context make these increasing deficits extremely dangerous.

But behind that rhetoric is motive. One side wants freedom to borrow from the future and spend it now. The other side wants to halt borrowing from the future and enforce payment from those in the present. But, even a simple and obvious statement of motive like this will receive no concensus in America. That is lack of concensus born out of ignorance of reality assessment and lack of education in broad multi-disciplinary fashion which is affecting most Americans today.

Like the Athenians depending upon Spartans for their defense, Americans are depending upon experts in their respective parties to learn the facts and make their decisions for them. And if the parties fail to act responsibly and deal with reality instead of ideology, Americans will fail to decide for themselves their future and inevitably wake up shocked as Alvin Toeffler put it, to find a future they don’t recognize and one they never wanted and would have rejected out of hand had they known what was happening.