> we're getting very funny fwee tweet. i welcome yours. check us out. good night, everyone. i'm megyn kelly. 2000 years ago, one superpower rose, dominated the world. it became famous for its military, and for having rule of law. and a stable currency. people could rely on. they built beautiful buildings. roads, aqua ducts. they created art and literature. rome flourished for 200 years in relative peace and prosperity. then it crumbled. why? political leaders grabbed power. that power turned many into tyrants who divulged into corruption. they raised taxes to pay for war and increased regulation. when the masses complained, they

tried to please them with handouts. sound familiar? is this what's happening to america? well, 1,000 of us have gathered here to debate that twist. and that's our show tonight. and now, john stossel. >> tonight, i'm in las vegas, nevada, for a special edition of our show. i would like to say that all of these people came here just for that, but they really came for freedom fest. the world's biggest gathering of free minds. this year's topic, are we becoming rome? now, free minds, that's the phrase we libertarians like to use to describe ourselves. this is basically a big conference of libertarians. and i think our minds are

unusually free, right? we had to free our minds to get these concepts, but a lot of people think we're crazy. on to tonight's topic, rome. is the united states about to fall as rome did? here's a depiction of barbarians ransacking the city. is this our future? first we hear from a conservative, a historian, and a libertarian. the conservative, steve forbes from forbes media. you have libertarian leanings, but conservative, i would call you. the historian, carl, an expert on rome. the libertarian, matt kibbe of freedom works, a group that fights against big government. matt, you first, are we becoming rome? >> i think we. i think the parallels are quite homino

ominous, the denbts, the arrogance of executive power taking over our country, but i think we have a chance to stop it. >> carl? >> i think there are similarities not only with the fall of the empire, which is watt most people talk about when they talk about the fall of rome, but the fall of the republic, which was 500 years earlier. there i seen romans in unconstitutional acts? h >> like stuffing ballot boxes? >> that did happen, that's bad, obviously, but it doesn't bother me as much as the old things, for instance, mary was elected counsel six years in a row even though under the roman constitution, it was term limited to one year. and people kept voting for him. they knew it was unconstitutional, that kind of stuff. >> now we have congress passing laws they haven't read. >> right, and presidents of both parties, legislating by executive order. saying i'm not going to enforce certain laws because i don't

like them. we have bureaucrats legislating through regulations. we have supreme courts saying it's constitutional for the government to take your property and sell it to someone else because he can give us more tax revenue, a lot of examples. >> steve? >> well, yes, you can always find parallels, but the fact that we're meeting, i think, shows that the antidote is coming about. we the people have not gone the way and been totally corrupted the way the romans were. we're not passive. we saw it with the tea party, and despite irs suppression, the tea party movement is coming back again. you're going to see it in 2014 and 2015. and they may try to feed us to the lions, but we're going to own the liars because we believe in free enterprise. >> that's a happy thought. i wish i were as optimistic as

you. but i fear we will become rome. let me just poll the audience. are you as optimist iic as stev? how many of you think we're going down the toubs, we're in deep trouble? most. how many of you think we're going to turn it around? they can't both be true. but again, you're not a normal audience, because you're libertarians, right? whacko birds, according to senator john mccain. that's what he called some libertarian minded powell titians. but walking around here at this conference and seeing the tea party booths and people selling investments in gold, and game show quizzes to test your knowledge of dead austrian economists. you have to kind of understand why we get our reputation as

eccentric and wonkish and different. is this unfair? is this fair? >> no! >> come on, isn't this group mostly men? mostly badly dressed men? my going to libertarian events. this is what i notice. it's people who care about numbers, less about how they look. i think steve forbes is the perfect example of this. the epitome of the both the wonkish geek. is this unfair? >> you're sounding like my opponents. so i didn't expect that from you. but let's face it. people who make things happen, you could describe our forefather, our revolutionaries in the same way. there are always minorities, persuade, become agitators, and

change the world. we have done it once, and we'll do it again. we are going to be the leaders. >> absolutely. >> you of all people should know, don't look at the superficial, look at the substance. we've got the substance. that's why we're going to ultimately win. >> i admire -- this is the optimism that makes america possible. matt, what about my libertarian slur. i look at your sideburns and i think people would say, this is not a normal guy. >> definitely guilty as charged. >> but you go to thrown to thou these meetings. are the people, how? >> we're different because we have read books and we do care about issues. but social awkwardness is not a sin in the defense of liberty.

>> and any -- i mean, i'm soelthsy awkward, too. i overcome it because i have to because i have a tv show. ask me friends, and they'll tell you i'm socially awkward. what is it about people who like to analyze? i mean, bill clinton is the opposite. he felt your pain. and then spent more money. is it a personality type? >> economists would argue everything we do when we fight for freedom, when we show up at rallies, when we care about the future of our economy, economists would say that's irration irrational, but we happen to think it's the best thing to do because we care not only about our country, but our future and our kids' future. that's not normal in the country and that's what we have to fix. >> it's part of our culture. entrepreneurs are always outliers, always trying to see things other people aren't

seeing. steve jobs, they said do you want marketing surveys, and he said no, because people don't know what they want until we show them. put it out and see if they like it. oftenti oftentimes, we fail, but you try to learn from failure. that's what freedom's about. take a chance, fail, learn, hope to do it better next time. if we accept the conventional wisdom, we would still be living in caves. >> carl, do you have more historical perspective to compare america to rome? >> the debt, the high spending the late empire. >> high debt and high spending. >> the evaluation of currency. there's another one. the empire of so-called silver coin was only 2% silver. that's how they devalued it. it got to the point that the roman government would not accept its own currency in taxes. you had to give goods. we're not there yet. >> thank you, carl. matt, steve. coming up, gladiators devalued

currency. a growing welfare state. other ways america is just too much like rome. much like rome. [cheers] [applause] [cheers] [cheers] [applause] life could be hectic. as a working mom of two young boys angie's list saves me a lot of time. after reading all the reviews i know i'm making the right choice. online or on the phone, we help you hire right the first time. with honest reviews on over 720 local services. keeping up with these two is more than a full time job, and i don't have time for unreliable companies. angie's list definitely saves me time and money. for over 18 years we've helped people take care of the things that matter most. join today. ( bell rings ) they remwish i saw mine of my granmore often, but they live so far away. i've been thinking about moving in with my daughter and her family. it's been pretty tough since jack passed away.

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welcome back to freedomfest. now, the welfare state. america didn't invent the welfare state. europe had one, and even rome had one. i didn't know that until i came to this conference. and two people who have educated me are charles murray, author of "losing ground" the book that woke america up to the destructiveness of welfare. and larry reed of the foundation for economic education. so larry, i learned from you the welfare state began about halfway through the roman empire. >> that's right. it took the form first of payments to recipients in the form of subsidized grain, the government gave it away at half price. but the problem was that they couldn't stop there. that later there was a man who ran for the office of tribune on

a platform of free wheat for the masses and he won, and it was downhill from there. >> they gradually raised taxes and gavestuff stuff away. >> that's right. including free salt, free pork, free olive oil. >> people would show up personally and just pick up their stash? >> long lines. in fact, they had a means test at one time and did away with it so anybody could show up and get this free stuff. >> and they decided that everybody had to be educated by the state. well, not everybody, but they started public schools. >> well, that was late. much later. in fact, rome grew to greatness with largely home schooling. and the first public school -- >> the first public schools didn't appear until around 250 b.c., and they were not funding wi the government until very late. >> the greeks actually mocked

rome for being backward for that. >> of course, they didn't last anywhere as long as the romans did. >> charles, you have educate us about welfare, about the handouts. do you see parallels with rome? >> yeah, if you take a look at roman society as it started to decay, it looks a whole lot like we do now. and it's not just because of the welfare state and the people on the bottom. it's also because of the people on the top who are increasingly living isolated lives from the rest of them. i find the parallels between rome and the united states right now to be very scary. >> so clearly, the welfare state poisons much of life. has horrible, unintended consequences, but do we just get rid of it. let me ask you libertarians. you're pretty hard core, i would assume. should america get rid of all handouts? [ cheers ]

>> but what would happen first time somebody starves? they say charity. charles murray, you wrote "losing ground." what's your answer in. >> in fact, i think if we got rid of the entire welfare state, that the ability of this very wealthy society to deal with the problems would work. all right? but i also would say -- i have to go wimpy on you now, don't applaud. i'm about to go wimpy on you. i don't think it's within the realm of possibility for an industrialized advanced society with as much wealth as we have to ever do that politically. and i think that libertarians are going to have to strike a grand compromise with the left. in effect, saying all right, we'll give you a big spending if you will give us freedom from

government interference. and so i would say, look, i'm with milton friedman. i say, use a guaranteed basic income. for everybody over 21. deposit it monthly into -- electronically into a known bank account, nathat's a very key thing, and let people take their lives back into their own hands. they'll have the wherewithal that they can deal with the necessities of life. if they can't do it, they have to talk to friends, neighbors, churches, the community. they have to make their case. i think that's a better way to go. >> you wrote a book about this. >> called "in our hands." yeah. >> i'm going to push back. first, i would say his better book is "in pursuit of happiness and good government." which really brought my mind around. but you're telling me, you're going to give them the money, and the crack head is going to

spend it all in two months and the social worker is going to go on tv and say -- >> no social worker. >> somebody, the "new york times" reporter will go on and say you're going to let this woman's children starve? it's not their fault? and then we have a whole new program. >> here's what you're going to have, john. you're going to have somebody who smokes it up in the first two weeks. you have another two weeks before there's a new deposit in their monthly account and he says, gee, i don't have the mon money. he doesn't have the option of going to a social worker. he has to go to the people he lives around and say, i really need help. they are in a position to say, we're not going to let you die, but it's time to get your act together. we're introduce once again the kinds of human connections that are the only way to change human behavior. >> and some who don't find the connections will die on the street. >> the united states has never let people die on the street. what we will now have that we don't have now, now we have

bureaucrats who cannot make the distinction between somebody who needs a kick in the pants and somebody who needs a pat on the back. we'll put thesis human needs back in the venue of human relationships. whereby you can apply the feedback loops of incentives and approbation and disdain and stigma and all the rest, which can make these problems solva e solvable. >> and this audience is different from most in that they understand that before the welfare state, there were these mutual aid societies everywhere. which helped people. larry, tell us about that. >> absolutely. nothing about being a politician that makes you more compassionate or caring than the people who send you there. so i have every confidence -- >> compassionate with other people's money? >> absolutely. i start with the premise, it's not the business of the government to redistribute our stuff. it's the business of government to protect our liberties. >> and in rome, when they gave

out stuff, it often went to the wealthier people? >> well, without a means test, which was the case in most of roman history, anybody could line up to get these goodies. which contributed to the ultimate bankruptcy of the roman state. >> one telling graph about the poverty rate is that the advocates of the war on poverty welfare can say look how the poverty line dropped sharply for five years after the war on poverty began, but you look at what happened before the war on poverty began and the line was just as sharp. people were lifting themselves out of poverty. >> the great untold story of the poverty rate is there was a miracle that happened from the end of world war ii to the 1960s. it was cut from about 40% of adults were beneath the poverty line to about 20%. the war on poverty starts, the line continues to go down for a couple years, and it flattens

out to where it's been ever since. >> because we taught people to be dependent. >> we changed the rules of the game that made it profitable for low-income people and especially young low-income people to do things that looked like, gee, this makes sense in the short-term, and are disastrous in the long term. >> i think the primary beneficiaries of the welfare states are the politicians, not the people it's intended for. >> why? >> somebody once said the welfare state is so named because the politicians get well and the rest of us pay the fare. i think that's exactly what's happened. >> thank you larry and charles. coming up, do you know that one roman emperor held orgies and threatened to execute senators' wives who did not attend? increepiness of rome, when we return.

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welcome back to this special edition of the stossel show. we're in las vegas for freedomfest. now, most people here are libertarians. we want to shrink government. we don't like taxes. but, hey, we need national defense. and local police, some pollution control rules, too. there's some things most of us say government must do. how are they going to get the money? taxes. got to have some, right? yes? a tough crowd here. and i see why. our taxes always tend to go up. and that was part of rome's problem, say two people who tried to spread the word about the damage taxes do. grover norquist is head of americans for tax reform. he somehow persuaded many politicians to pledge to never raise taxes. economist steve moore, for the

wall street journal. grover, rome had high tax rates? >> not always. at first, for about 400 years, they had no real direct internal taxes because they looted their neighbors. >> we're not advocating that, right? >> we may tax the canadians, but that may not work out. then, even that wasn't enough. and so they started having dramatically higher taxes, the amount of money they spent on the armies to occupy the other guys cost more perhaps than they were able to extract. >> started with tariffs. >> they had tariffs. augustus, he brought his first death tax. costten teen brought his first income tax. all the stuff we're living with, they were thinking of. the property taxes, so much that people were actually abandoned their property and saying, leave me alone. then they had to pass laws to not let you leave your property. you had to stay there and farm

it so they could loot you. toward the end, it got very, very rough. and it's part of why things didn't work. >> one penalty for not paying your taxes is being sold into slavery. >> or killed. >> yeah. >> people in modern day irs, right? that's what they do to us now. when they would demand payment in gold and silver, the only way to get it was to sell, in some places, children into slavery, to get currency. it was that bad. >> but 1%, i read, was the highest income tax. >> what happened, grover is exactly right. what happens in rome, one of the reasons rome fell, they kept collecting more and more money from the tributaries, the outlying areas, and it went into rome, and you had a plamassive revolt of the people all around the country who weren't in rome. by the way, that's happening in america today, i think. people are sick and tired of seeing their tax dollars sent to

washington and none of it coming back to the states from whence it came. that's one of the reasons we should lower federal taxes. that's one of the great things about america. we're a federalist system. the states created the federal government. the federal government did not create the states, right? >> the reaction to the tax farmers that they had to go out and collect the taxes. >> they called them tax farmers? >> tax collectors. it was so bad, in one revolt in asia minor, they killed about 80,000 of them in a day or two. they took -- >> we don't advocate killing tax collectors on this show. >> it was a four-year war that he waged to put down that revolt, but it was clearly a serious tax revolt. john, to your point, when you ask about the 1% tax, i don't know what the tax rates were in rome, but when we created our income tax back around 1913, 1915, the top income tax rate

when the income tax started was just 7%. within ten years, the top income tax rate went from 7%70%. you know, and it's remained high ever since. that's why i have always believed steve forbes had it right. we ought to go back to an 18% flat tax, get rid of all the deductions, all the loopholes, make it as simple as possible. create the money you need, but don't create all these special interest groups. the people who are most oppose today the flat tax are people in washington, d.c. because you take the power away from washington. >> when we went into revolt 1774, 1775, americans in the colonies were paying 2%. our oppressors, the brits in london, were paying 20%. it's expensive running an empire. we need to go back towards 2 persh. i like 2% better than 18%. >> 2% would be clear, we're at

40% when we include state and local. >> we want to get towards 2%. we function fairly well beyond that, and the reason the british were taxing themselves at 20% is they were running an empire. >> thank you, grover and steve. coming up, when governments can't raise taxes anymore, they find other ways to fleece people, like devaluing the currency. rome did that. hey, america is doing it now. but what does that do to a country? didn't work out so well for rome. that's next. next overmany discounts to thine customers! [old english accent] safe driver, multi-car, paid in full -- a most fulsome bounty indeed, lord jamie. thou cometh and we thy saveth! what are you doing? we doth offer so many discounts, we have some to spare. oh, you have any of those homeowners discounts? here we go. thank you. he took my shield, my lady. these are troubling times in the kingdom. more discounts than knoweth what to do with.

now that's progressive.

welcome back to the freedomfest conference. the world's biggest gathering of people like me. people who care first about liberty. now, most of this audience hates taxes. actually, even many politicians don't like them, because taxing

people makes people mad. so forever, politicians have found sneaky ways to fund their spending. roman emperors put less and less silver into the coins they issue, which causes forflation. a bushel of wheat that costs 8 roman dollars costed 120,000 dollars. then robert and jeffrey study currency debates, but they say we better be careful, the american dollar is already going down the tubes. what do you mean? i have feared that, and yes, inflation is low. >> are you kidding me? look over time, right? there's grandmothers rolling over in their graves right now. grandmothers rolling over in their audience seats rights now. any person who says, i remember when that cost a nickel. things didn't get more expensive in the cost of labor.

the currency has lost available. it takes $23 to buy what one dollar could in 1913. >> you had to go back to 1913. paul krugman will tell you inflation is about 2% a year, historically, that's pretty good. >> this isn't a big mystery. the federal reserve has created a lot of money with whatever we're up to, but the banks are holding most of it back. it's not going into the price level because they're holding it as extra reserves because the fed started paying them interest in the extra reserves. that's a form of robbery, actually. >> how? explain that to people. >> i mean, yeah, it's a serious issue. you can't get a return on your money anymore from savings. >> really, you can't sustain cost s without an investment. that's what these policies are discouraging. >> let's go back to the rome parallel. they prospered and then they did

what politicians do. >> their empire kept expanding and they were bringing in more people they could loot and bring back to rome, and they hit the maximum extent of their empire and there was no one left to steal from, and then they started resorting to other ways to raise money, which was debasing their currency and taking silver of our of their coins, and the big government destroyed rome. it wasn't the barbarians. they came as the government was collapsing under its own weight. >> nero issued coins that were 95% silver. the next emperor, this was 85% silver, and all the way down to -- >> you've got a good one. 85% silver. it ended up becoming one 5,000th of the silver content of the original by about 300 a.d. >> his is what the government does when they can't tax people. this is essentially what's gone

on in this country. about 100 years ago, with the creation of the federal reserve, we nationalized the dollar. put it under sort of socialist control, under a kind of cartel arrangement, and we have seen its quality diminish under 100 years, which is faster than it happened in rome if you think about it. >> it's hard to get people worked up because they look around and they say by and large, america is doing pretty well. >> there's a great dpeel of distortion in the system. people thought the real estate markets were doing pretty well in 2007. there are surprises around the corner. and especially with the government that refuses to fund itself honestly, this is dishonest funding. the very fact of the existence of the fed makes the government to fail. the politicians don't even have to worry about spending. so long as the fed is there with its unlimited credit card to pay for everything, there's no default risk on u.s. treasury.

we have unlimited spending, there will be no spending mistake as long as the fed is there to bail anyone and everyone out. >> when inflation comes, what will the government do? the romans issued wage and price control. the united states government has already done this. remember, when the dollar was finally divorced from gold in 1971, what came afterwards? a decade of high inflation, and then universal price control under nixon. nixon was kind of a softy compared to the roman emperor, because when they did it in 300 a.d., he made it punishment by death, and even still, you got the same bad consequences. shortages and things not coming to the market, and distortions throughout the economy. >> and they wouldn't let you change jobs. konstantin said anyone who violate violates that may be bound with chains and reduced to servile conditions.

when he implemented price controls, he blamed greed. some people are always eager to turn a profit, even from blessings from the gods. our shared humanity urges us to set a limit. i hate it when people use greed to explain something because greed is always there. people are like the greedy oil companies are driving up places. whoever looks and says, the oil companies became less greedy and prices came down. it doesn't work like that, so greed doesn't explain. >> one solution some people say to government playing with the currency is the gold standard. we had one for a while. didn't really work. >> a pure gold standard would be a great thing. >> before you answer that, for this libertarian audience, how many of you old gold? either actual gold or investment? just about everybody. i imagine you watching out there, it's not so high. you're different. why? because you don't trust those

federal reserve notes? take it away. >> gold -- really great gold wouldn't have the government involved at all. >> gold has fallen from 1600 or 1300. some of you people lost a lot of money. maybe this is bad advice. >> gold investments and the gold standard are two different things. it's speculation, what you're buying into. it doesn't mean you're recommending gold as an investment. >> it seems like they would go together. you would believe in gold. >> entirely depends on what people's expectations of the future are. that should be embodied in the price of gold now. do we think everybody else is too pessimistic or too optimistic. that's a good investment, not whether it's a good standard for our money. >> what about bit coins? >> i think bit coins is one of the great innovations. it only came about four years

ago. it was one in a long succession of attempt ed digical currencie. >> it's an internet currency that is limited and ought to protect you against the valuing dollars. >> it's currency and a payment system. very innovative. by comparison to the dollar, bit coin makes the dollar look like a dawn cere. there's been no improvement inure money in a long time. it's the currency for the digital age. it's more like physical property. the best thing is the government is not involved with it at all. it's a beautiful thing. the most implausible sort of currency. you know, if you had to ask me ten years ago, will the market create a new digital currency that allows me to exchange with anybody in the world in central america, africa, all the world's ports. even if you don't have a credit card, you can exchange money, will that happen? no, it won't happen, but it did, and it's brilliant. >> on that note, thank you.

coming up, roman emperors spent big bucks on stadiums like the coliseum, used for things like fights between gladiators, sometimes fighting animals. there are american parallels to that, too. that's next. gladder aiders and sometimes fighting animals. there are american equivalents to that as well. to that as well. we will have that so there i was again, to that as well. we will have that explaining my moderate to severe chronic plaque psoas to another new stylist. it was a total earrassment. and t the kind of attention wanted. so i had a serus talk with my dermatologt about my treatment options. this time, she prescribed humira-adalimumab. humira helps tclear the surface of my skin by actuallrking inside my body. in clinical trials, most adults with moderatekin to severe plaque psoriasis saw 75% skin clearance. and the majority of people were clear or almost clear in just 4 months. humira can lower your ability to fight infections, including tuberculosis. serious, sometimes fatal events, such as infections, lymphoma,

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welcome back to freedomfest with the question, are we rome? meaning on the route to collapse. >> ancient rome's rulers trying oo keep the people happy despit corruption, offered distractions and bribes. one roman poet called it bread and circuses. sometimes it was an actual circus or chariot races or gladiators sometimes fighting to the death. american doesn't allow that yet, but sports economist jc bradbery said government does still fund circuses. today, they take the form of sports stadiums. what do you mean? >> its arcommon thing in a community where a politician says we need something to pull our community together, to keep us happy. a sports stadium is just what we

need because it's going to increase economic development, and we're all going to be richer. they say they'll pay for themselves. they don't. >> in atlanta, the county will receive $200,000 a year in parking revenue, they got $30,000. >> right, that's in gwinnett county. they said we're going to get parking revenue. didn't happen. or they get much less than they said. >> it wail pay for itself from day one. >> and they never do. the thing that is so frustrating for me is it has been studied so much. >> i thought you won this fight. >> economists like you have explained it. the football team has eight home games a year. how is that economic stimulus. >> let's go back to the bread and circuses comment. that is not a positive comment about human species. that's saying they're being placated. give them bread and circus. they were giving up some of their freedom because they were given something they wanted. sports are popular today. people say, why don't i support

this, i'm nots going to punish a politician for supporting it. >> let's go back to the rome parallel, because our stadiums do pale compared to what they did. the gladiators, this was entertainment to keep the people pacified because they were getting ticked off? >> not even that they're ticked off, but some form of entertainment to distract us from other things that are going on. if i know that a politician put a football team on the field and i like football, i'm really going to focus on that. i'm nots going to focus on the declining schools, the roads falling apart, and maybe some of those things politicians really can't help, but it's certainly something that individuals and citizens can focus on and say this is a puzative thing for our community, and that's why they're so popular among politicians. >> some of the things i learned at this conference, that most gladiators were slaves or prisoners of war. 90% of them survived the fight because it would be expensive to the owner of the slave if they

were killed? >> right, i believe if you end up -- if the slave was killed,ia would have to pay the owner, so you didn't want them to do. >> this was the kind of entertainment for the kind. at the time, seeing death on the streets wasn't that uncommon. it was something people enjoyed and wanted to see. luckily, we have much more pacifistic sports, if you want to use that word, and we don't have death. in fact, we're trying to make our sports safer. it's sort of the difference in the way we view those competitions today than they were once viewed. >> the arrogance of the emperors increased in 169 b.c., 63 african lions and leopards, 40 bears, elephants, were hunted down in a single two-day show. tigers, crocodiles, giraffes, hip opotmouses, they would bring them in from all over the world to kill them, and the emperor would sometimes kill them themselves. >> today, we have sausage races,

club seats, luxury boxes. but it's definitely the same thing. it gets more and more extravagant. that's the same kind of attitude that we have today. >> at least problematic as our politicians are, they're not that bad. thank you, jc bradbery, and when i said that bad, we barely touched the surface of how bad the roman rulers were. that's next. hi, i'm terry and i have diabetic nerve pain. it's hard to describe, because you have a numbness, but yet you have the pain like thousands of needles sticking in your foot. it was progressively getting worse, and at that point i knew i had to do something. once i started taking the lyrica the pain started subsiding. [ male announcer ] it's known that diabetes damages nerves. lyrica is fda approved to treat diabetic nerve pain. lyrica is not for everyone. it may cause serious allergic reactions or suicidal thoughts or actions. tell your doctor right away if you have these,

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is america rome? no, thank goodininess, we're nos bad in 1 h00 ways. our taxes are actually higher, but we don't kill people for sport. when we go to war, misguided or not, we don't conquer or plunder. and when we win, we usually leave. that's different. in america, poor people now live better than the emperors did. we have air conditioning, google, pain killers, flush toilets, longer lives. thanks to the example set by george washington, our presidents actually leave office voluntarily. and although our current president wasted money on ext v

extravagant travel like his recent $100 million trip to africa, nero was much worse. he never wore the same clothes twice. when he traveled, he traveled with 1,000 carriages. the emperor, however your pronounce his name, set up a brothel in the palace. tibeerious established an office of imperial pleasures. which gathered beautiful boys and girls from all corners of the world so the emperor could defile them. calligula said to have made his favorite horse a senator, as depicted here. >> allow me to introduce, a new senator. you will treat him as your peer. in every way. >> even president obama wouldn't do that.

so arrogance as our politicians are, and repugnant as many of them are, they are at least not emperors who like calligula, held orgies and executed the senators' wives who didn't show up. but rome matters because empires do crumble. rome lasted the longest of all of them. the ottoman empire was next. it lasts 600 years. then the spanish, almost that long, as did the british. we lasted less than 300 years. we're doing better than alexander the great. his empyronely lasted 13 years. but in our 250 years, we've accomplished amazing things, amazing prosperity. we just can't take it for granted because free and prosperous is not the natural state of things. in human history, it's rare. we now are starting to look a

lot like rome, and we ought to worry about that. that's our show. thank you for coming. see you next week. i'm chris wallace. obamacare coverage began this week for millions of americans. setting the stage for its biggest test yet. >> i'm thrilled that we are going to have millions of people for the first time that have health security. it should be a great new year for lots of families across america. >> there there are going to be a lot of bridges. i don't know that good news for this is going to outweigh the bad news. >> former governor mitt romney joins us to discuss the road ahead for obamacare. plus p. terror attacks in russia. intensifying security concerns for next month's olympic games in sochi.