Sorry I've been so out of touch this afternoon, was at a Heritage event on The Lessons of the Roman Empire for America Today. Fairly banal stuff, save for a puzzling assertion that the ancient Romans only worked two days a year to pay taxes (ever heard of tribute?) and a peculiar, though I guess standard for Heritage, insistence that Rome possessed a remarkably lean and efficient civil bureaucracy that only began bloating as their empire crumbled. So there ya go -- bloated, inefficient bureaucracies are the harbingers of doom, which makes Bush, Rumsfeld, Chertoff and Brown the four horsemen of America's apocalypse. Best question of the day, "Why did the West create such a brilliant Empire as Rome while all the East could furnish was Genghis Khan?"
Uh, ok.
The speaker's answer, for those interested, is that the West learned from Greece and Khan didn't. Praise Jupiter! Once the bizarro history lesson wrapped up, I went out to the lobby, got a bunch of folks mad at me for being an anti-torture, pro-universal health care hippy, gorged at Heritage's fine buffet, and left. Normal posting resumes now.
