Rome handed out free grain to 40,000 citizens in 73 BC. By 46 BC, Julius Caesar found 320,000 people lining up for their monthly ration. That eight-fold expansion happened in under three decades, and it shows you how welfare states actually grow.
No Roman senator stood up and announced a plan to addict a third of the city to government bread. It happened incrementally, through political competition. Each magistrate who wanted votes expanded eligibility. Each expansion normalized the next one. The citizen who once considered the dole shameful eventually expected it, then demanded it, then organized politically to protect it.
This is the core mechanism free market thinkers have identified across every era: once you create a transfer program, you create a constituency for that program. Recipients vote. Administrators build careers. Grain merchants who supply the state develop a stake in keeping the contracts flowing. The political economy locks in.
Caesar, to his credit, actually cut the rolls back to 150,000 through verification audits. It was one of his more economically coherent moves, though the Senate still murdered him. His successors quietly let the numbers climb again.
What did the dole require? Massive grain imports from Sicily, Sardinia, and Egypt, organized through state logistics at state expense, funded by taxation and conquest. When the conquest revenue dried up, the obligation remained. Rome had written a check against future military success, and future military success eventually failed to arrive.
The lesson is not complicated. Distribute a benefit and you distribute dependency. Distribute dependency and you distribute political power to whoever controls the distribution. The grain dole didn't weaken Rome overnight, but it made every subsequent reform politically impossible.
After an FBI investigation with our DOJ partners, Dr. Fauciâs associate, David Morens, just pleaded guilty to conspiracy in a scheme to avoid FOIA requests and the Federal Records Act connected to COVID-19 research grants.
The FBI uncovered that Morens, Co-Conspirator 1, Co-Conspirator 2, and others conspired during the COVID-19 pandemic to defraud the United States after the National Institutes of Health terminated Co-Conspirator 1âs grant.
NIH terminated the grant, âUnderstanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,â based on allegations that COVID-19 emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Wuhan, China.
Mr. Morens and his co-conspirators then agreed in writing to intentionally hide their communications from public view by corresponding through Morensâs personal Gmail account rather than his official NIH email account.
This FBI investigation remains ongoing. No one is above the law.
-DKPđșđž
Bonjour @grok
en te basant sur mes tweets, je suis :
- quel dictateur ?
- quel philosophe ?
- quel personnage de fiction ?
- quel politicien ?
- quel homme religieux ?
- quel personnage historique ?
- quel artiste ?