Democracy: The Problem and the Benefit

We tend to think of the Roman Empire as a single entity with an Emperor at the head. But, before the Empire, Rome was a democracy with the famous Roman Senate as the primary governing body. Rome was a republic in those days. In the time of Julius Caesar, democracy ended and the Empire began. There was no set way for new Emperors (or Kings) to succeed one another until the middle ages. In my book, The Fall and Rise, I discuss the unwieldiness of the Roman Empire and how the Emperor Diocletian developed the East and West Empires and a succession scheme of Caesars and Augusti. It didn't work well, so Rome was plagued with civil wars and eventually, the West was overrun with barbarians.

I mention this because one of the topics that seems to be on everyone's minds these days is the inability of our own, U.S. democracy to work. I would actually challenge that notion and suspect the Founding Fathers would be delighted with the "grid lock". That is the way they designed our government. I won't go into a civics class here, but they way our system of government is set up, it is bound to frustrate any major change except almost immediately after an election, usually a Presidential election. This feature of our government is both a problem and a benefit. Have you noticed that people in power seem to get very frustrated in their jobs? Why? They can't get anything done.

There is one problem, however, which is serious. The entitlements are moving in a direction that will mortgage our children's future and when it finally dawns on them that this is the case, politics will move from "class warfare" to "age warfare". In the meantime, the developed economies will continue to struggle with high unemployment, slow growth, a growing gap between unskilled wage earners (if they have a job) and highly skilled, well educated earners. Another question. How much longer will the highly skilled workers support the unskilled workers?