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What's happening to fiat currency, they note, is much the same as what successive Roman emperors did to the denarius - debasing it to the point of near worthlessness. They quote The Collapse of Complex Societies by US anthropologist Joseph Tainter, which argues that monetary collapse was one of the main reasons for the Fall of the Roman Empire.Roman emperors had to do all the same things our 'monarchs of money' are doing today because everything was going to pot! Yes, certain types are well-positioned to take advantage of the chaos to enrich themselves (and thus speeding up the crash and spreading mass misery through society) - the senatorial class in Rome, the goldsmiths in medieval times and the banksters on Wall Street today - but given what we now know of the climatological and environmental factors that repeatedly bring down civilizations, it is probably more accurate to say that monetary collapse is a symptom of economic downturn, and not a cause..."By debasing currency, increasing taxes and imposing stringent regulations on the lives of individuals, the Empire was, for a time able to survive. It did so however by vastly increasing its own costliness and in doing so decreased the marginal return it could offer its population. These costs drained the peasantry so thoroughly that population could not recover from outbreaks of plague, producing lands were abandoned and the ability of the state to support itself deteriorated."
Comment: Dr. Lance deHaven-Smith, Professor, School of Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University, speaks below on elite political criminality. DeHaven-Smith coined a term in 2006 to delineate crimes of high office: State Crimes Against Democracy, such as Watergate, Iran-Contra, Plamegate, the assassinations of JFK, RFK, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the staged Gulf of Tonkin incident.