I was thinking about the growth of Imperial Rome. I listened a very long series on this topic several years ago. The net of it was that they constantly expanded their borders to defend from barbarian attacks. They would get attacked from the north of Italy, so they conquered that. They got attacked by the Carthaginians, so they took over Carthage. They got attacked by Carthages neighbors, so they expanded there. They got attacked from Spain, so they expanded there.
In the end, they had at their height an Empire that ran from south Germany to North Africa, and from the Iberian peninsula at least to eastern Turkey, and I’m not sure they didn’t get farther than that.
Of what benefit was all this? In the end, they still had barbarians on the frontiers, particularly the Parthians and the Germans/Goths. If memory serves they lost Caesars in both Iran and the Rumania area. They had the power to exact taxes, but they had in turn to keep up the roads, garrison the towns with soldiers, and provide a criminal justice system.
If they raised taxes to the point where they were making good money, they got revolts, which required more soldiers, which cost more money. They did forge a long term peace in the regions under their control, and as conquerors they were very enlightened. They allowed natives to do things their own way, and developed a legal code so advanced our own system is largely based on it today.
But of what concrete benefit was that to the average Roman? Yes, the elites lived well, but the ordinary Roman did not. They still had urban poverty. And to the point they lived under a tyranny, in which the Caesar could do substantially whatever he wanted, which made rebellions for power all the more common.
As I heard the history, the real reason for the decline of Rome was their frequent civil wars, which killed so many regular soldiers that their ranked had to be refilled by barbarians, resulting in a steady decline in loyalty and quality. Over time, the barbarians did most of their fighting, and Alaric, who sacked Rome, had been a Roman soldier himself. He was a commander, if memory serves.
Then the Roman Senate become the Holy See, and the Roman emperor the Pope, in effect. In that role, they held enormous power for more than another thousand years.
I guess I’m thinking out loud about the benefits and costs of Empire. Was it all worth it? How would our history have been changed if they had contented themselves with a life in Italy? They set up administrative structures which arguably enabled the creation of the Islamic Empire. Their Republic was the basis for our own.
They built roads which in some places continue to be used to this day. They provided aqueducts, some of which stand to this day. They gave us our law. They enabled Christianity to blossom.
I’m not quite sure where I’m going with it. It will come to me at some point, but not in the next five minutes.
Edit: I think where I was going with this is that I was thinking about the French in Vietnam. I don’t remember what resources they coveted, but I think it was rubber. Assuming it was rubber, we have this situation where the French are killing Vietnamese rebels so they can run slave plantations such that they can get the rubber for next to nothing. The rubber, itself, is cheap. But they have to supply huge quantities of military aid to make it happen. Aside from the moral question, this makes no economic sense. Why would it not have been cheaper for them simply to support the Vietnamese in making their own rubber, and then buying it?
So much misery flows from not factoring in all the costs of decisions. As Henry Hazlitt said, when dealing with economics you always, always, always have to look at the effects on EVERYONE, and at all time phases, from the short, to the middle, to the long term. It is quite easy to achieve a desired effect in the short term–what we might term the linear outcome–but much harder to make a desired reaction self sustaining over the long haul.
This is the principle difference between Leftists and Liberals on many levels. The former believe that peace, prosperity and social order can be imposed. Liberals understand human social systems as formally complex, and work therefore not to build political orders, per se, but moral orders that can be expressed politically.
The converse, then, is that Leftists seek to build political orders that can impose “morality”.