Quote from: TaunSew on May 21, 2014, 11:58:49 PM

If Rome Collapse - then it didn't occur to the people who lived through it ~ historians regard the 'collapse' of Rome as having lasted 300+ years at a time when the life expectancy was in the 30s to 40s and after the collapse did occur general nutrition and living standards actually improved.

Rome itself didn't disappear - people continued to live within Rome itself and the 'Roman Empire' technically got bigger, if we regard the Roman Catholic Church as being the proper continuation of the Empire.

True collapses rarely occur in history - they're more like fades into obscurity and often whimpers at that.

Try telling that to the 1.4 million people the fled Rome because the Totalitarianism was so onerous. See following post I had made in the Mad Max thread:

Quote from: AnonyMint on December 31, 2013, 11:44:26 PM

Quote from: blablahblah on December 29, 2013, 10:25:11 PM

But the world has never ended, not even once. Therefore your doomsday preaching makes you a fool.

For the people depicted below, this world ended. Yeah I know "it is different now", and every generation thought it was.

Quote from: AnonyMint on December 28, 2013, 10:10:29 PM

Europe now has universal health care ...[snip]...

...Eventually the cancer eats itself, because we run out of other people's money. Now the Americans are falling into the same cancer that razed Europe in the early 19th century, with a repeat underway.

Actually what happened is the capital shifted to the Byzantine or Eastern Roman empire:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/05/21/unions-out-of-control-the-real-poison-pill/

Quote from: TaunSew on May 21, 2014, 11:58:49 PM

Maybe the one exception was the Soviet Union where the collapse was almost instantaneous to the American perspective, although the Soviet people themselves were well evident it was a dying institution at best.

Educate yourself about the collapse of the Soviet Union:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/03/18/the-us-did-not-cause-the-fall-of-the-soviet-union-that-is-a-false-belief-on-both-sides/