Things didn't turn out so well for the Romanovs at the end of their dynasty. Ignore the people at your peril.

A belated Happy Independence Day to all our American friends and relatives! The state of the States is such that atheists ponder the existence of God just on the off chance a wish for be divine intervention would be granted. God Bless America.  

Cullen Murphy's book: Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America In an excellent interview with Murphy in the California Literary Review (Oh yes p2p can go all ivory tower and egghead at times, even at a party) Paul Comstock asks

...Finally, from what you've learned in your studies of history, what would you say is the single biggest mistake that America is in danger of repeating?

There are actually two. One of them is the privatization of power. And the other is the psychological need of empires to hold on at all costs.

The privatization of power has to do with the slow seepage of public authority into private hands. I've already alluded to the way America's military capacity has increasingly been franchised out to private contractors like Blackwater and Halliburton, just as Rome had to look for outside contractors. Something similar is occurring with our intelligence operations, And with the management of many domestic operations of government. Highways, prisons, police forces, water systems--you name it, in every sector of government there's a movement afoot to sell off jobs the government is doing and put them in the hands of contractors. Often this is done in the name of efficiency. Or of economy. In any specific instance, viewed in isolation, it may make sense. But the consequence overall is to reduce the ability of government to actually govern: to push buttons and make things happen. Meanwhile, the ability of private contractors to act in their own interests only grows. The shift in power relations will come to a head in a moment of crisis, when those who ostensibly hold public authority find that they lack the power to wield it. And those private interests who hold the power may lack the will and the legitimacy.

Everywhere I look I see reflections of this theme. Neocons have convinced those in government that civilization is too expensive. "It costs too much!" No matter what the issue. This isn't news. But it wasn't always that way. Here in Canada an NDP  government in BC was embarrassed by the architectural awards amassed by school boards. Canadian Architect

Burnaby Mountain is one of B.C.'s new breed of stark, lean, economically-driven schools for the 21st century. In the 1990s, the province was producing some of the most architecturally acclaimed public schools in Canada. But these days, an industrial aesthetic and entrepreneurial outlook dominate school architecture, the legacy of a curious chain of cost-cutting and design policies.

The first link in the cost-cutting chain was the most widely acclaimed facility of them all: an elementary school near Victoria called Strawberry Vale (see CA, May 1997). In the words of government officials and detractors within the school district, the Patkau-designed school was "extravagant," "self-indulgent" and sent "the wrong message to the taxpayer," constituting proof in its critics' minds that public school construction budgets were higher than they needed to be. The issue drew bureaucrats' attention to other prominent recent school architecture in British Columbia, which, like Strawberry Vale, appeared to them to be so high-end as to suggest an improper use of public money. The education minister at the time, Paul Ramsey, famously declared that "the first thing you do when you design a school is you don't hire a fancy-assed architect."

In short order, the NDP government gashed the per-square-metre construction budgets by up to 30 percent, reducing elementary school unit rates to just $900 per square metre (about $83.60 per square foot), and introduced stringent mandatory design guidelines, prompting spirited but impotent cries of protest from local architects. Some, like the Patkaus, simply resigned themselves to never designing any more schools in the province. Others struggled as best they could.

Hello Grover Norquist, hello bathtub.
Goodbye innovation. And over a long period of time, goodbye civilization.

Christopher Hume's column laments our inability to see how Europe and Asia are now becoming more attractive places to live, work, and play. We've declined.

Fiddling while Rome rebuilds

...Europe, and even Asia, are the real New World, the lands of opportunity, innovation and the future.

With our sclerotic systems of governance, the U.S., with Canada following obediently on its heels, has slipped into a state of open decline.
Empires don't collapse overnight and certainly for many North Americans, everything's just fine, thank you very much. But the signs are there. In ways big and small, local and global, we are falling behind. It's not just that we have let the environment go, or that our economic performance isn't keeping pace, or that we live in a culture of reruns, it's more that we have lost the capacity to deal with these issues. We are paralyzed, inert.

He goes on to describe our inability to deal with garbage, energy conservation in building design, transportation issues, and our inexplicable inability to create a rail link from the Toronto airport to downtown as examples of how Europe is ahead of us.

Whenever I've visited Europe lately I've felt I could live there, that things are happening. They've created an economic union, abolished most barriers to labour movement, planned for more sustainable communities, dealt with some of the problems our neocons have put off the table completely. (No they're not perfect. That's not my point, or Hume's.) We've failed to observe the advances others have made while we've been caught up in bellybutton gazing.

And what's wrong with the world that a Mexican monopolist (telecommunications, etc.) has become wealthier than the innovator Bill Gates? $67 billion: Mexican wealthier than Gates  How is it that Moscow is the world's most expensive city?
I've got the spirit of '76 today so I'm offering some old toasts from The Claremont Institute

The patriots understood that the fight for freedom is never over. Liberty is dependent on the rule of law: "May Justice support what courage has gained." Freedom also abhors special interests, privilege, and government elites who lived above the people. That's why they toasted: "Freedom from mobs as well as kings."

Cheers!