Capitalism Minus Democracy Equals the Roman Empire

Historians like to bandy about such phrases as "the glory of Rome", "the peace of Rome". These are both deceptive phrases, and interestingly, they are most often invoked when describing the civilization of Rome after they ceased being a functional Republic (i.e., when their democracy had been destroyed by the legal chicanery of rapacious aristocrats and the Senate was maintained only as a gentleman's business club). Life could be good for people in the ancient world of the Roman Empire, but you had to be free and you had to be rich. If you weren't, your life was grim. If you were a plebeian (a member of the working class), you had to compete with slave labor, and at any time you could end up going into debt, not being able to keep the bill-collector at bay and having to sell yourself, your spouse, and your children into slavery in order to pay them off. You had two elected representatives, the Tribunes, but they could only complain to the Senate (the elected body representing the wealthy classes); the Tribunes had no legislative power as the Senators had. So if you were poor and free, you were constantly overshadowed by the threat of falling into slavery, and you could not hold any official post with decision-making power. Your only hope was to become a client of a patron (who would belong to either the patrician class of hereditary large landowners of "divine" ancestry, or to the equestrians, literally "horsemen" but really the nouveau riche who had acquired vast fortunes from international trade). The patron would protect the interests of the client, so long as the client did the patron's bidding in any and all causes serving his designs, whether the client's moral conscience agreed with the missions he was sent on or not -- if anyone wants to know the social-historical origins of the Mafia, this is it. This social practice was the only way for a lowly freeman to ensure not being physically, legally or economically abused by more powerful folk in a society that assigned full de facto rights and legal protections only to the wealthy. Whether you had been a nobleman in a barbarian society and gotten captured in war, or you had been a skilled artisan and Roman citizen who had to sell himself into slavery because of mounting debts, to fall into slavery regardless of previous condition -- and yes, if your parents were slaves, you inherited their status as slaves -- was to lose one's status as a human being. In fact, you were considered an "animate tool" like a plow-horse. You could be abused with impunity under the law. This is what it means to live in a world where the only effective form of representative government limits itself to a wealthy over-class with legal advantages over everyone and everything else. This is also what happens when one's humanity pivots on one's ability not to fall into debt or such impoverished circumstances that you can no longer feed yourself and your family and must surrender yourselves to the slave-market auction block. This is not a democracy nor a model for a democracy. Yes, capitalism occurred in the Roman world on a scale that would not be matched again until the Renaissance Period a thousand years later. But we must stop allowing ourselves to be deceived into believing that "capitalism" and "democracy" are synonymous terms. Capitalism can function quite well without democracy, in fact, it "flourishes" into economic totalitarianism when there is no effective form of democracy to hold it humanely in check. For those who are not wealthy, this spells the end of their rights as human beings. We have people in our country who are working very hard to make a form of society happen here much like that practiced by the Roman Empire. I think most people living in America today (I would say at least 90% of the population) would not enjoy such a form of "time travel", as most of us would find ourselves propelled into slavery or the quasi-slavery of ethically-compromised client-hood under obligation to the powerful. We have wealthy people seeking to buy up our water aquifers even now, making potable clean water the preserve of the moneyed classes. Family farms are being bought up by agribusiness in unfair legal games of trade and financially onerous regulations of management. Can anyone say "latifundio"? Maybe the wealthy of our country would like North America to be more like South America. And guess whom Latin American aristocrats modeled their form of economic society after?