ubernoir wrote:
"declining moral standards" every generation has people who complain about declining moral standards

I've yet to read the comptroller's full statement and I'm not an expert on the fall of Rome. (U.S. schools spend annoyingly little time on "other people's" history. This tends to produce people who think that every important thing in the past happened here. This is the root cause of a great deal of this country's problems understanding and communicating with the rest of the world... They just don't know much about the rest of the world, and what they do know they assume isn't very important because they've never been told to focus on it. It also tends to create knowledge gaps about rather important subjects such as this one...)

Your quote seems to indicate that the root cause of the fall of Rome is centralization of economic power... the death of the middle class. Is this an accurate take-away?

the Republic fell because people chose short term stability over liberty

What sort of liberty? Economic? Social?

I do think the US has a non-trivial problem with overconsumption. We're a country that coasts along on debt. We have big houses and big cars and we don't own them.

The real problem begins with you start paying off your credit card bills with borrowed money. I think we're starting to do that. You can't juggle forever. Eventually, you miss a throw.

RE: FT.com / World - Learn from the fall of Rome, US Comptroller warns