Lessons from One of History’s Biggest Scumbags
Mar 3, 2023·Tap to summarize
Two weeks ago, I told you that the US government had just published its annual financial report. The government by its own admission lost $4.1 TRILLION in FY 2022. And this is 34% worse than the the previous year’s $3.1 trillion loss. And the rest of the financial report only gets worse from there… They describe Social Security’s extreme insolvency, projecting total unfunded liabilities of the program to be $76 trillion. And they forecast that US government debt will one day reach 566% of GDP. I’ve written about this extensively over the years, because history tells us that the consequences of this type of financial mismanagement are severe. This is not the first time that a country has had a lot of debt, nor the first time incompetent leadership has consistently failed to recognize and solve big problems. So in today’s podcast episode we go back in time thousands of years to heed the lessons of one of history’s biggest scumbag rulers. Unsurprisingly, he raised taxes, debased the currency, violated the rule of law, confiscated property, eliminated dissent, vastly expanded the government, and created all sorts of idiotic and destructive laws. BUT, this is fixable. And today we actually discuss some common sense ideas to demonstrate how easy it should be, at least conceptually, to take giant leaps in the right direction once again. Unfortunately, the people in charge seem to have zero interest in doing any of that. So I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for politicians and bureaucrats to ride to the rescue. But at the same time, as I often point out, this is not a bad news story. The world is not coming to an end. In fact, I believe the world is still full of abundant and incredible opportunities, despite the trajectory of its largest superpower. And we close this episode with the core central message of this organization: we have control over our own lives. Regardless of what they do or how badly they screw up, you do not have to go down with a sinking ship. You have the power to solve these problems for yourself. You can listen to today’s podcast here. Download Transcription as PDF Open Podcast Transcription [00:00:00.810] Today we're going to go back in time to the 26 September in the year 480 BC to a very critical island in the Mediterranean. Now, if you know your history, you might be thinking, I know what he's going to talk about, because 480 is a very famous year. 40 BC is a year where Greece, which I'm going to do Greece and air quotes for right now. I'll explain why in a moment. Greece and Persia, they're at war with each other in a in a war that historians is often described as this epic battle between eastern civilization and western civilization. [00:00:28.900] If Greece loses against Persia, there is no Socrates, there is no Plato, there is no Western civilization. So it's a really important year. 480 BC was the famous battle of thermopole 300 Spartans fending off the Persian. There are other people there as well. There's 700 Thespians and some others as well. [00:00:44.910] But this very small number of people in this, like the battle of the Alamo, fighting off the whole army so that everybody else can live and regroup and defeat the Persians, this is followed by the Battle of Salamis, this famous naval battle. Salamis was a very important island in the Mediterranean. And this battle of Salamis where the Greeks vanquished this much larger Persian fleet and embarrassed Xerxes, and it was the turning point in the war, again, supposedly took place on September 26, 480 BC. I say supposedly took place. This is according to very painstaking astronomical calculations. [00:01:16.970] It's not like the Greeks tell us, oh, it was September 26. There was no such thing as September in 480 BC. So the people have gone back and done these astronomical calculations to figure out the date of this based on information that we know. And they said, well, we think the Battle of Solomon's took place on September 26, 480 BC. But that's actually not what I wanted to talk about. [00:01:37.630] There was something else going on on September 26, 480 BC, also in Greece. But what I mean by Greece remember a lot a lot of people say Greece talk about ancient Greece, and ancient Greece is really just a catch all word that we use today to really lump together dozens of these independent city states. You know, the Athens and Sparta, Corinth, thebes Ithaca, Argos, Troy. These are all different city states, but they're all totally independent from one another, right? Just because Athens is doing something doesn't mean that Ithaca or Argos is doing it as well. [00:02:08.730] These Greek city states typically shared a common language, common religion, common heritage, et cetera. But they're vastly different from one another. They don't share the same internal politics. One might be democratic, the other might be might have a monarchy, right? They have different systems of government, they have different economies, different everything, and they're all independent. [00:02:26.420] Saying Greece in the ancient world is like saying Latin America today. Again, there are things that are common. Typically a shared language and typically, maybe shared religions and culture and so forth. But Panama is totally different than Bolivia in the same way that Athens is totally different than Ithaca. And just because Athens and Sparta were at war with Persia again, doesn't mean that all of Greece big, g greeks, all of greek civilization was at war with Persia. [00:02:53.520] And this is where I want to talk about, because far to the west of the Greek mainland, there's another island. And I talked about this as this important, critical island in 40 BC. Well, there's another island that wasn't salamis. There's another island that was part of greek civilization. This island was Sicily. [00:03:09.450] Sicily had been the greeks been coming in since 735 BC. But there were a lot of people that had come before. There's a neolithic civilization, early bronze age civilization, even in the 2000s BC. The phoenicians. We talked about the phoenicians before this really great seafaring trading culture set up outposts all over the Mediterranean. [00:03:27.630] They had been coming into Sicily. The carthaginians were really interested in it. Everybody loved Sicily. Why? Because Sicily was a paradise. [00:03:37.100] It was everything that the mainland greeks wished that they had had, especially in athens. The Athenians are like, oh, my god, this place is incredible. In athens, the soil was terrible. It was rocky, it was hot, it was very little nutrients. It was really hard to make it work in athens. [00:03:50.560] In Sicily, they had incredible soil. They had a lot of rain. They had the agricultural production was off the charts. They had fruit orchards just bursting with trees, vineyards, beehives flowers, huge grassy plains where they had plenty of carrying capacity for livestock. They got a cattle and sheep and everything they wanted. [00:04:08.510] They had endless forests with timber in the hillside. They could build anything they want. They had fish everywhere, and the fish reproduced faster than anybody could fish them, anybody could eat them, and it created a lot of wealth. There are people that were, I mean, almost perplexed by the level of well, Plato was disgusted. Plato went to Sicily. [00:04:25.820] It was almost disgusted by just the level of wealth that was there. There's another philosopher, a guy named empedocles, and empedocles remarked he went to a city in Sicily called accra GENTO, and he said, these people here, quote, devote themselves to luxury as if they were going to die tomorrow. But they furnish their houses as if they're going to live forever, basically saying, there's just no end of the spending here. They just go out and gorge themselves every single night, the banquets, the wine, the liquor, everything. And then they go and they just have the most incredible extravagance in their homes. [00:05:00.100] And for people, it was perplexing, but as a result, this was the big prize. Sicily was just this this big prize. It was this big paradise. And the ultimate prize in this was the city of syracuse. Syracuse was started off as just a tiny village. [00:05:15.340] The Corinthian Greeks had come there and they start, they started this little outpost, this tiny village, but relatively soon it become this major center of wealth and trade. And people there were incredibly rich, just the richest of the rich. There was one story, a guy that supposedly had a clothing collection worth 120 talents, which would be worth basically $15 million in today's money, right? Again, Plato wrote about this. He said, yeah, there's just women everywhere, people looking for rich husbands, constant banquets, performances, nightlife, and this was the envy of the region. ...
