Were Romans socialists? High taxes for welfare, Caesar leaving money for every citizen of Rome after he died...

This.
You can't understate the importance of patronage. Any gifts from the aristocracy were "gifts". There was almost always a quid pro quo.

Yes

Modern militaries still do a lot of that stuff. I know the Canadian military at least utilizes its engineer corps, and I doubt the US is different.

I don't think you know what socialism is.

They didn't have a political concept of socialism. They just tried to do what they thought would work. They had lots of hungry poor people who couldn't afford their own food, what else are they going to do but have a grain welfare?

>welfare and infrastructure are socialist

Holy shit read a book

He can't, the library is a service provided by the government so its socialist

You have to take in account though that even when the rich giving money to the poor is almost some sort of charity, the poor were far more equal with the rich than in today's society. If they didn't have power at all chances are the rich would care nothing about general welfare, just like in today's society.

When the rich are hyper-powerful they tend to try to appear more “human" in order to deny the importance that power inequality has in political decision making. It's just rational.

youtube.com/watch?v=_IO_Ldn2H4o

Caesar was a proto-socialist of sorts.

Early Roman Republic, the one that really built the empire was proto-socialist.

>The vertical integration of the Roman Republic’s social strata is striking. In his book War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires, Turchin tells this anecdote:

>“Roman historians of the later age stressed the modest way of life, even poverty of the leading citizens. For example, when Cincinnatus was summoned to be dictator, while working at the plow, he reportedly exclaimed, ‘My land will not be sown this year and so we shall run the risk of not having enough to eat!'”

washingtonsblog.com/2015/10/when-the-aristocracy-leaves-the-commoners-in-the-dust-the-empire-is-doomed.html

However as the power of the Senatorial class grew, they concentrated wealth power for themselves. Caesar and Gracchus brothers tried to fix this, bt were murdered by the senators.

Later, the empire became unhealthy in body and mind, the plantasion system favoured by the rich destroyed the soils, the general population was so poor they could not reproduce and barbarians needed to be imported to replace them.

>socialism = welfare
ebin simbly ebin :DDDD

Americans unronically believe this

Pic somewhat related.

I just wanted to use it.

Jokes on you, I posted that ironically and I'm an American

Sad thing is that there are actually people in the us who believe things just as nonsensical as what you said

It works both ways though
People so conservative that they demonize the internet for allowing the exchange of ideas
And people so liberal that they demonize the internet for allowing the exchange of ideas

Democracy is dead and the people killed it

Yeah well, internal violence and sectarianism kills democravy.

Although being a liberal in the traditional meaning of the word and being intolerant is just a contradiction in terms.

>socialism to explain what was a necessity of the state to prevent either mass famine or mass revolt, or both.
Free market would fix it without government intervention.

All of them have engineer corps and universities(at least - almost all). In fact engineering studies in military colleges tend to be top tier.

Words change in meaning
Faggot no longer means "bundle of wood" to the average person, and on this site it doesnt even mean "homosexual.
You faggot.

Only if every externality is internalized, namely: only creating a totalitarian system (not necessarily a state) in which everything is regulated.

The word liberal got only demonized in the us after heavy idiotization of the population. In europe for instance liberal still means «someone who holds liberal values». Radical shit, huh?

Free market was the reason they needed food handouts to begin with.

Nope. It was government intervention that caused it.

Government spending on anything other than national defense, domestic security or a system of courts is basically socialist.

Nope. It was internal inconsistencies between government intervention and free markets, which led to internal conflagration and predominance of personal or group interests above the common good.

You do realize the richest men in Rome typically had a huge number of "clients" who were dependent on them for money and land right? Private ownership was a big deal in Rome so no, socialism never existed then in the Roman Empire.

t. libertarian

>national defense
largely ineffective when compared to regional militias as evidenced by Vietnam war
>domestic security
bring me my pinkertons
>courts
private courts can also work, they'll also be less bribable because if they'd be bribed they'd get outcompeted by other private courts

fuck you statist cunt

Nope. It was caused by the state demanding from farmers to supply their troops with food instead of letting free market economy fix the problem - supplying the food was good interest when not enforced by the state to be sold for 10% of its price(the competition would cause it to cost 5% of its price though, the 5% went for administrative spendings of course)

in this way farmers got impoverished and starved. then the government decided they should give them foodstamps to fix what they've fucked up, instead of letting it fix itself and ended up in welfare state

sounds familiar?

this better be bait

>giving free education to people to involve them in democracy.
>socialism

You do know that public education was a thing waaay before socialism was even a thing, right?

>largely ineffective when compared to regional militias as evidenced by Vietnam war
>one war in one country is proof

>bring me my pinkertons
>yfw the public gets lazy, and private security loses business
>yfw Russia comes in, and flattens the place

>private courts can also work, they'll also be less bribable because if they'd be bribed they'd get outcompeted by other private courts
JUST FUCK MY JUSTICE UP

>fuck you statist cunt
I can't tell if this is b8 or a 12-year old

If it wasn't for state education our society would be much better-educated as it would encourage competition between more numerous private schools

You are just describing inconsistencies between free markets and state regulation. Neither free markets lead to inevitable freedom nor does incompetent government intervention.

Yeah, predominantly religious or big business funded schools...

today centrism, tomorrow stalinism.

Yeah yeah...

>tips fedora
>tips welfare check

there's nothing wrong with religious schools they tend to have the highest standards

big business funded schools would also encourage more useful skills rather than libruls arts as well

Also: you do realize that the internet, which is the greatest educative tool in the whole history of mankind was a public iniciative in the first place? Yes, it was a military intelligence network when it began, but without government spending we wouldn't have things as youtube video tutorials, khan academy, free books at a clic of distance and so on...

It was a sort of proto-Fascism.

tbf a lot of socialists argue education was better in the us before public schooling. Many have pointed out that public schooling was originally developed by fascists, literal fascists, as an indoctrination tool.

It is not without merit. Schools are obedience training and produce dull-minded people. Before schooling the US had a very cultures and literate working class with a sophiticated understanding of the world, and a militant labour movement fighting for their rights. Now /pol/ is relatively sophisticated in comparison to the general population.

Ah, stereotypes and miscaracterization. The last resort of someone without arguments.

That's actually very interesting, but it's just what happened in the us, namely a particular case in a specific context. In other places of the world public education has actually moderated political discourse and integrated people from different cultures into the ways of democratic life.

Also you have to remember that public libraries for instance have exactly the same ends and effects of providing free public education, just for a narrower, more intelevtual sector of the population.

>Any gifts from the aristocracy were "gifts". There was almost always a quid pro quo
Private investment into infrastructure was a huge thing for the aristocracy though, especially monumental architecture. Grandiose generosity was a great way to climb the social ladder

I am not saying that private education has not a good role to play in society though, it's just that it usually doesn't uphold democratic or republican (in the traditional sense of the words) values, for obvious reasons: every business, and therefore big money financed schools, has an agenda which will, eventually, contradict either democracy, common good or both.

When the state controls education, they can be advised by educational authorities on curriculum. When education is left to the free market, you'll be left with a generation of retards who believe in conspiracies.

>When education is left to the free market, you'll be left with a generation of retards who believe in conspiracies
yeah, look at all the retards that get churned out from Gordonston and Harrow
fucking mong

>Caesar left money to the people
The vast majority went to Octavian and Antony is a fucking liar.

And none of that is state ownership of means of production, so no.

>High taxes for welfare
Taxes were high to pay for the army. The corn dole was a budget afterthought, and in fact the hardest part was organizing it, not paying for it.

>A society with literal slaves
>Where you were literally a second class citizen if you weren't Roman.
>Which was ruled by a plutocracy that makes the oligarchs of today look like kittens in comparison
>Which required that you pledge loyalty to the emperor, many times under threat of execution.

Maybe some Stalinist bastardized version of Socialism.

Absolutely irrelevant, and you just proved my point. Those are schools in a "statist" society, where the STATE requires them to have a certain minimum curriculum. Naturally, they're gonna be high-quality.

But in your ooga booga fantasy, the vast majority of schools would be garbage or straight up psycho since they have no standards to follow.

Not only this, but what the Roman state provided what wasn't welfare, it was just food aid so that you didn't starve en masse. Roman society was in no way egalitarian, people didn't own the means of production and this was in fact a huge problem late in the republic where all the farms would be bought up and monopolized by plantations. You were expected to serve in the military, you didn't recieve things for "free", you were expected to pay for it through service to Rome.

Roman society inspired fascism much more than it did socialism, especially in Italy. Hell, the term "fascism" refers to the Roman symbol.

When he grows up he's going to be a libertarian

>When education is left to the free market, you'll be left with paying 500% the price for tuition and having teachers write textbooks to sell to their students, making the students think capitalism is evil and everyone needs to feel the bern
fixed

topkek

On a related note, the textbooks that come out of Texas are a good glimpse of what would happen with no state control. Except 10x worse.

No, the age minimum to become libertarian is 10.

And the age median is probably 11.

Libertarianism looked appealing based on theory, then I thought about it and saw that it was as practical as socialism

it had more fascism than socialism
It was a state driven economy, social classes enforced by the state, the policies of the first caesars were keynesian tier, created a lot of jobs in infrastructure and war.

thats some of the paralels i can find related to you question op.
Oh and warrior units cult, victory cult, populism and civilised vs barbarian are things we got to see in the 20 century

Except Fascism as an ideology rejected both Marxist Class Conflict. and the concept of a class based society too, the only difference being that in regards to class Fascism didn't seek to purge the Bourgeoisie through revolution.

The Keynesianism is correct for the most part, though it's fairly easy to argue that Nazi Germany functioned on a bastardisation of Keynesian economics, since funelling more and more into the miktiary would not produce a long term economic benefit, compared to investing in infrastructure or industry.

>Keynesianism is correct for the most part

Keynesian economics has been BTFO for a while now.

It's basically a codeword for “let's hand everything to big corporations under the pretext of protecting the interests of the people!!!!!!"

I was referring to it being correct to link it to fssicms, not judging the concept itself. Shoo shoo Friedman

Basically, what socialism does now
>international corporations have uprooted the sovereignty of democracies
>"Let's hand all of our well-being to the government!"

What you are describing is authoritarian socialism, not libertarian or democratic socialism, in which private businesses are not only tolerated, but encouraged, as long as they limit themselves to do their job.

You're using a blanket term for a whole lot of variation.

They were the total opposite. They had no concept of welfare. High taxes were for funding the army and handing out bribes to the army to stop them executing the current emperor. Caesar left money to every citizen for political purposes. Aqueducts were not hooked to everybody's homes or anything like that. Pre-Christian Rome had no concept of charity at all, the poor, downtrodden, elderly and disabled were to be mocked. The grain dole was specifically to stop the urban populace of Rome from rioting, and it wasn't even given to the very poorest who were left to starve. The annona was given to Roman citizens only.

Gonna be funny the next time your city floods and you're begging them to pick you up in a helicopter.

>Pre-Christian Rome had no concept of charity at all, the poor, downtrodden, elderly and disabled were to be mocked.

I feel like this is just propaganda, where is your source?

Uh, none of that is correct. Philanthropy was considered a core value of the Roman republic.

>I feel like this is just propaganda, where is your source?

Sunday school. They actually covered a lot of history.

Some shit I read in my old uni library a few years back. They were pretty authoritative but I honestly can't remember much about them. They talked a lot about Roman attitudes, alimony by the emperors such as Trajan where a couple of children would have their education paid for the estate of the emperor.

I'm not pro-Christian, it's just as Christianity became more powerful as a force in the empire Roman culture became more preoccupied with what we now see as charitable giving to the poor instead of for example, giving employment to them through building projects.

You're misconstruing the sort of stuff the Roman elite did in the Late Republic as about helping the poor. It never was, at all. Bread and circuses was never for the actual needy.

>Sunday school. They actually covered a lot of history.
Do you actually expect a Sunday school to give you an impartial account of pre-christian Rome?

>You're misconstruing the sort of stuff the Roman elite did in the Late Republic as about helping the poor. It never was, at all. Bread and circuses was never for the actual needy.

Not just the late republic. "Philanthropos" is a classical Greek concept the Romans adopted, that being charitable to the needy showed greatness of spirit and helped bind society together. And yes of COURSE it was often done just for show, what is that supposed to prove?

If anything Rome was some sort of proto-facist state, in fact many of the ideologies on facism derive from Roman politics

welfare =/= socialism

I considered a theory.

After the Punic Wars many soldiers who returned were left without their farms, as they had been left unattended and debts accumulated so they were forced to sell them to the patricians, whom would create the latifondia in which slaves worked the land instead of free farmers. This caused many romans to migrate towards the cities, where they'd live in insulae (the latin term for poor people's condos, but also for slums) jobless unless they joined the military and gained money through looting until the marian reform and military payment were introduced.

Think about it, the Punic Wars, the flux of slaves from these wars and many more and the creation of patrician-controlled latifondia were creating a social class of warriors. The lower class who'd work the soil would be the slaves, the nobility would be the hierarchy leading the state in an olygarchic fashion, those romans who were already in the middle class would still be merchants and artisans and this mob of unemployed farmers would become the professional fighting arm of the roman olygarchy.

Olygarchy, think about this word. In what other society do you have a nobility in full control of the state, a warrior-citizen class and a soil-working slave class? But of course, in Sparta!

Rome was basically the cultural lab in which spartan society was going to be experimented and applied to an italic people, but with a few variants. It almost resembles the events of the 1st industrial revolution in the UK,, where the creation of the "enclosures" forced hordes of farmers to enter the cities and form the proletarian worker class in factories.

A similar scenario can also be seen in the middle ages with the oratores, laboratores and bellatores but that's a different context and application so we should probably ignore it I guess.

Are you some fucking web-warrior that are trying to make a meme picture stating the point the greatest empire ever was socialist? If so. Just stop.

Oh my god you can literally feel the Frankfurt school in this one. What is with these new methods of trying to impose new political ideas on old fucking Empires.

Socialism is above all about the people owning both influence in terms of power and industrial output.

The Roman senate must have been one of the biggest conservative "institutions" to have ever been

Turchin is a biologist stydying societies.

You are an idiot. Marxist history is a real thing. Just because it comes to conclusions you don't like does not make it not useful.

See the Romans knew their shit.

They fed the masses bread and circuses.

Which Libertarians fail to realize when they think they can throw the masses of poor under the bus with no reprecutions.

See... When the poor are hungry or bored, they will do things like steal, loot, and riot and even overthrow the current government.

You have to give out welfare to the poor or you will end up with a French revolution.

The Romans knew this and that's why they fed the poor and gave them entertainment.

Overall it wasn't a big drain on GDP and they could focus on their conquests and keeping good public order.

Libertarians could learn a thing or two about the Romans.

Socialism was one of the reasons of Roman Empire decline.

>Excessive civilization caused the Roman civilization to collapse

No. The abolishment of slavery and lack of new slaves ruined the Roman economy.

Basically, when you have slaves (or robots) economics doesn't play by the same rules as we think in modern times.

You have labor that works for free as long as you feed it and beat it.

Once you free the slaves, you lost your economy.

Most of the time, fuck knuckle. They're a bunch of hyper-aggressive retards who think that being paid to shoot sandniggers makes them better than me, but when they actually help people they're tolerable.

Most soldiers are better educated than their peers you neet

Also years of civil war and not understanding how inflation works.

>Tiredness of life

Well that hasn't killed Veeky Forums yet so

>largely ineffective when compared to regional militias as evidenced by Vietnam war
Holy fuck, no.

The fucking roman empire itself is plenty of proof that regional militias get shit all over.

So were alexanders fucking conquests, given that he used a state-organized force with a professional and semi professional core to shit all over an empire that essentially did nothing but hire private mercenaries and levy local militias to fight.

And then there's the successors themselves, who went full professional and shit all over local forces for centuries.

Historical materialism is a fucking joke

>Guys Societies progress from slave states, to fuedalism, to capitalism in a linear fashion.

>Except for when slavery existed in Capitalist England, that doesn't count

Marx = mostly retarded

>Their economy was one of patronage, poor people would solicit the rich and work for them/vote for them and in exchange the rich would help them out, sort of like a mafia family.
isn't this where the essence of fascism comes from?