The Barbarians Aren’t At The Gates… We Already Allowed Them To Take Possession Of The Gates: Part One Of Today’s Two Henry George-Related Posts

The Barbarians Aren’t At The Gates… We Already Allowed Them To Take Possession Of The Gates: Part One Of Today’s Two Henry George-Related Posts - Howie Klein, May 29, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]

…In Progress and Poverty, [Journalist/Economist Henry] George had written that when growing wealth creates more inequality and corruption, civilizations collapse from within. The barbarians who sacked Rome in 410 AD met little resistance. George warned that the same could soon happen here— and might have happened but for the powerful reform movement he inspired. “Whence shall come the new barbarians?” George demanded. “Go through the squalid quarters of great cities, and you may see, even now, their gathering hordes. How shall learning perish? Men will cease to read, and books will kindle fires and be turned into cartridges.” Today’s new barbarians smashed their way into the US Capitol. The book burners weren’t far behind….

On Tuesday, The Atlantic ran an essay by Adam Serwer, The New Dark Age. “The warlords who sacked Rome,” he wrote, ominously, “did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking— a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall… The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power. By destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior. Their victory, though, would do much more than that. It would annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed. Without those systems, America could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age.”

....

My comment: The Roman decline began when Rome started farming the Italian peninsula with slaves. Slaves didn't preserve soil fertility, so Rome became dependent on its North African colonies for food. When the Visigoths raided down the Iberian peninsula and into North Africa, those food shipments ceased. The Roman public was starving, and opened the gates to the barbarians bringing the "Dark Age."

This also has an interesting parallel to the pre-Civil War South in the US. Cotton farming depleted the soil there, and the farmers knew they had to have Western states be slave states if they were to continue farming as they had. This dynamic is one of the causes of the Civil War in the US. 

...

Henry George’s Ahead-Of-Its-Time 1879 Suggestion That We Tax Wealth, Not Work— Part II - Howie Klein, May 29, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]

…George’s remedy was straightforward and popular: shift taxes onto unearned wealth and use the revenues for public benefit. Today’s version would mean taxing capital gains like wages, implementing wealth taxes on fortunes over $50 million, and closing the carried interest loophole that lets private equity vultures pay lower rates than teachers and firefighters.…

Did you catch how Norquist framed higher taxes on millionaires as an “attack on the small-business community?”….