Late Republic Policies, and Their Inevitable Conclusion
Understand What Time It Is
Welcome back, and thanks for reading. Today’s article is something of a follow-up on Tuesday’s post about what sort of policies could be implemented that would at least partially fix some of the big problems America faces. Today’s is on, through a bit of Roman history, what tends to happen when that isn’t done. I hope you find this interesting, and, as always, please tap the heart to “like” this article if you get something out of it, as that is how Substack knows to promote it!
President Trump has so far done much good as president, and was undoubtedly brave in running despite the lawfare and physical attacks launched against him by the regime. That being said, he has a nasty habit of repeating whatever convincing thing he heard from the last person to whom he spoke…which leads to unfortunate comments and predictable outrage online, as has now happened with his comments on the 50-year mortgage and how Americans lack the talent to build batteries and missiles and so our country needs H-1B economic migrants.1
It’s unlikely he meant quite what he said, particularly given that he’s so far been reasonably good on the immigration question, including legal immigration. His administration is canceling the awful OPT program,2 has started collecting the $100,000 per H-1B fee,3 is investigating H-1B fraud,4 and has forced out enough of the foreign-born population that it declined for the first time in decades.5 Given the scale of the H-1B fraud and the fact that 100 million foreigners are within our borders, that’s not enough, of course. But, still, some good steps have been taken, and the administration should be applauded for them.
Still, it cut deep to hear Trump exclaim, “No you don’t!” when Laura Ingraham told him that there are plenty of talented Americans who could work in the aerospace industry instead of being replaced by H-1Bs.6 That is particularly true given that, far from just being a poor choice of words, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that “more people are becoming naturalized under this admin than ever before” and the H-1B process is being “sped up.”7
Hopefully, it’s primarily talk from the Trump Administration, and different actions are being taken behind the scenes. Right now, it’s hard to tell. What is not hard to tell is that there is a certain class of person—the donor class8—that very much wants H-1B labor pouring in to push down the wage cost of white collar jobs.
Elon Musk, who has Trump’s ear again, is in favor of more immigration.9 Companies like FedEx10 and Amazon11 have been repeatedly caught laying off huge swathes of their American workforces and then replacing those Americans with cheaper H-1Bs…despite the fact that H-1Bs perform far worse than American employees.12 They are simply cheaper, and so they are displacing Americans.
As a result of those trends, it has gotten next to impossible for promising young people to find good and steady work. For example, even those who do everything right and graduate with a STEM degree that they were told would at least get them steady employment if they work hard have found it impossible to get a job in their field. Engineers have lower employment rates than liberal arts majors,13 and software development is more hollowed out as a field for Americans than the Rust Belt.
This comes despite the fact that our graduates perform better, when tested, than the H-1Bs from India and like countries who are replacing them.14 So, what gives? Why are 6.1% of new Computer Science grads unemployed and nearly 17% underemployed despite the vast need for them generated by our IT-heavy economy? Why are 7.5% of new engineering grads unemployed and 17% underemployed? They’re not dumb or lazy; they finished mentally taxing and intelligence-demanding degrees.
It’s for one reason: the oligarchs don’t like paying Americans the wages they need to be paid to maintain an American standard of living. So, to avoid doing that, they have imported an army of slave laborers who do a worse job for a lower cost. Such is what former META executive and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey explained quite well in a recent interview, calling out his class and saying, “You would not believe what I saw in Silicon Valley. The H-1B abuse is insane. It is obviously a scam to replace US workers with, basically, slave labor that can’t ever escape.”
Such is obviously true. What’s more, nothing is new under the sun, and we have seen this phase of history before. Such is, of course, what sparked the rise of Tiberius Gracchus, the very sort of responsible populist that Trump seemed to be. His story, and what followed, shows us where this is going if our oligarchs don’t change course and embrace economic nationalism instead of rapacious, cosmopolitan globalism.
Tiberius Gracchus and Roman Slave Labor
Tiberius, returning from the Third Punic War, saw that the sturdy yeomen who had once been the backbone of the Roman Republic had been replaced by slaves. Forced to fight in faraway lands in the legions for year after year, doing their duty as men and citizens, their farms had gone to the weeds and their families were chased off of them.
Families that had farmed the same little patch of land for generations lost it because the primary breadwinner had long been fighting, and his family was left unable to cope with his death or absence and farm it profitably.
Exacerbating that situation was that the oligarchic class was growing wealthy from the wars at the same time as the yeomen who fought the wars were growing poorer and poorer. So, using their newfound cash, the oligarchs bought up the lands that had once supported the yeomanry and kicked Rome’s veterans off their farms, replacing them with slaves.
Thus, what had once been a nation of farms tilled by yeomen became huge estates ruled by war profiteers and farmed by slaves captured in the wars from which the yeomen profitted so little and their avaricious “betters” so much. Adding to this, the rich used debt slavery schemes to entrap the poor and take what little they had, adding usury atop the pile of burdens the increasingly dispossessed yeomen were forced to bear as they attempted to do their duty as citizens and keep their lands (check out this footnote to read the Plutarch passage on this).15 German historian Theodor Mommsen, succinctly describing the sort of process by which the yeomen were destroyed in his History of Rome, wrote:
“To these evils was added the farming on a large scale, which was probably already beginning to come into vogue, dispossessing the small agrarian clients, and in their stead cultivating the estates by rural slaves; a blow, which was more difficult to avert and perhaps more pernicious than all those political usurpations put together. The burdensome and partly unfortunate wars, and the exorbitant taxes and task-works to which these gave rise, filled up the measure of calamity, so as either to deprive the possessor directly of his farm and to make him the bondsman if not the slave of his creditor-lord, or to reduce him through encumbrances practically to the condition of a temporary lessee of his creditor. The capitalists, to whom a new field was here opened of lucrative speculation unattended by trouble or risk, sometimes augmented in this way their landed property; sometimes they left to the farmer, whose person and estate the law of debt placed in their hands, nominal proprietorship and actual possession.”
And, describing how such a process after the Punic Wars meant the farmers were ruined, destroyed, and their farms that had once supported yeomen families merged into vast slave plantations, Mommsen noted:
When the small holdings ceased to yield any substantial clear return, the farmers were irretrievably ruined, and the more so that they gradually, although more slowly than the other classes, lost the moral tone and frugal habits of the earlier ages of the republic. It was merely a question of time, how rapidly the hides of the Italian farmers would, by purchase or by resignation, become merged in the larger estates.
…
If a Roman senator, as must not unfrequently have been the case, possessed four such estates as that described by Cato, the same space, which in the olden time when small holdings prevailed had supported from 100 to 150 farmers’ families, was now occupied by one family of free persons and about 50, for the most part unmarried, slaves.
It is hard not to think of the trend toward 50-year mortgages, entire neighborhoods owned by private equity funds, and entire companies staffed by H-1Bs when reading that passage; a lifetime before the mast of debt and dispossession in our homeland by an imported crop of foreign slaves whose presence benefits only the oligarchs is far from foreign to us now.
Oligarchic Intransigence and Populist Uprisings
The oligarchs, of course, insisted they were the virtuous ones. “We bought these lands, these slaves, these estates…what right have you to complain?!” That they had, in reality, broken the law (as nearly every user of H-1B visa employees has lied and broken the law) was left largely unsaid.
But it wasn’t unknown. The former yeomen of Rome, once proud citizen-soldiers who were reduced to being an urban poor by the usurious and rapacious practices of their craven and predatory elite, knew what had happened.
So, they attempted to solve things through the ballot box and elected Tiberius Gracchus as their tribune. He vowed to stand up for them, and push through the moderate and just laws necessary to restore their stolen lands, farms, and lives.
To do so, Tiberius introduced a perfectly just and fair law that would accomplish what they needed without going a step beyond what was needed. As Plutarch says, “Never did any law appear more moderate and gentle, especially being enacted against such great oppression and avarice.”
But the intransigent elite refused to contemplate the moderate and clearly just law introduced by Tiberius Gracchus, despite the fact that all it would do was reverse their criminal gains. No fine would have to be paid. There would be no levy on their other assets. They would just lose what wasn’t theirs. Still, they hated it, and so they murdered Tiberius. Using a whipped-up throng of their slaves, they found Tiberius and beat him to death along with many of his supporters.
The issue did not go away, however. The Gracchan land law had been passed and remained in effect. As Mommsen notes, “Tiberius Gracchus was dead; but his two works, the distribution of land and the revolution, survived their author. In presence of the starving agricultural proletariate the senate might venture on a murder, but it could not make use of that murder to annul the Sempronian agrarian law; the law itself had been far more strengthened than shaken by the frantic outbreak of party fury.”
Further, Gaius Gracchus, the brother of Tiberius, still lived. And so the increasingly angry yeomen elected him to the tribunate. Surely, the plutocrats wouldn’t again break the sacred laws and murder a tribune, particularly one who was merely administering a fair and moderate law for the benefit of the republic and the yeomen who composed its armies? Yes, Gaius was a bit more interested in power and large changes than his brother…a bit more radical and power-hungry…but he was still a Roman and would act with dignity.
Alas, the oligarchs remained as intransigent as ever and howled in pain at the mere thought of losing their ill-gotten gains. Thrashing and screaming, they tried to block Gaius and his land law. But Gaius was willing to play hardball to a much larger degree than his brother. So, fighting back against their howling, he caused the rapacious elite a great deal of pain by transferring responsibility for corruption cases out of the hands of the plutocratic patricians and into the hands of his class, the equites. This meant he could likely destroy any enemy through the courts, by exposing and punishing their corruption. The elite was unwilling to contemplate such a state of things. So, in the wake of yet another fight over the populist laws, Gaius was murdered by the Senate.
That was enough to end Rome. Whereas things could have simply been fixed in the days of Tiberius, now the oligarchs and the people could never again be one. The res publica, or commonwealth, was dead. Reprisal after reprisal between the two sides followed the death of Gaius. The Gracchan supporters were executed in a summary trial. A generation later, Marius and Cinna stormed Rome on behalf of the people and beheaded oligarchs, leaving their heads on pikes that dotted the Forum. Sulla retook Rome for the optimates, and got his revenge in full, with the proscriptions he used to target the populares entering the realm of legend.16 Then came the next generation of conflict between Julius Caesar and the people against Pompey and the oligarchs, with more Roman blood spilled than ever.
It ended with Augustus. When he and Antony, as part of the Second Triumvirate, took Rome from the last optimates, the process set in motion by the election of Tiberius Gracchus was finally completed. In fact, it meant the extinction of the optimates and the old families that composed it. Whereas Julius Caesar had been merciful, Augustus and his allies would be as cruel as needed to ensure that they would not face the same fate of Tiberius, Gaius, and Caesar. As Adrian Goldsworthy records in his Augustus: First Emperor of Rome:
The triumvirs presented the proscriptions as the necessary elimination of enemies of the state and its leaders. They declared that Julius Caesar had shown clemency only to be murdered by the very men he had spared. They did not intend to repeat that mistake, and so would kill without mercy anyone they considered to be an enemy, ignoring even ties of friendship and family.
And so in the end, the oligarchic class lost its power. The people had won, though they hardly ended up better off in terms of farmland, and the people’s leader would forever be above the plutocrats, most of whom were dead. The day of the rope and sword had come to their homes thanks to their intransigence, their greed, and their insistence upon predatory practices; they had sown the seeds of their destruction.
They could have just given up their ill-gotten gains and maintained the yeoman class that served as the backbone of the republic. Instead, they chose to remain wedded to their worst impulses, and so they were all killed.
An Intransigent Elite Is, Eventually, a Dead Elite
Such is quite relevant to our times. As Jesse Kelly noted in a post on X, “The Roman Republic collapsed into civil war in large part because the wealthy elite collaborated with the political class to mass import foreign slave labor and disenfranchise the Roman citizen. Seems relevant.”17 Indeed it does; facing a revolt of the populares, the donor class that pulls the strings has decided to double down on importing slave labor for their corporate latifundia.
The American Republic has always had its great and influential men of immense wealth, whether the Virginia planters or Gilded Age robber barons (though both groups were far more patriotic than our present oligarchs). But it has also long had a large and prosperous middle class. Like the Roman Republic, we had a class of prosperous people in the middle, whether farmers, shop owners, artisans, or even wage-earning employees. We weren’t a society of haves and have-nots, of a smug and rich oligarchy and a teeming underclass.
Mass immigration that depresses wages and thus dispossesses the American middle is a problem for that very reason. As Trump himself said a few short years ago, “[H-1B visas are] very very bad for workers... it’s very bad for our workers and it’s unfair for our workers and we should end it.”18
That is absolutely true. All such practices are bad for America because they are bad for all Americans except a few oligarchs at the very top. They do to our equivalent of Rome’s sturdy yeomen what the slave-farmed latifundia, usury, and corruption did to them. They turn those who would be independent, proud citizens into a broken and impoverished underclass. They create immense resentment, and that resentment is the sort of thing that leads to Augustus wiping the slate clean by eradicating the optimates.
An intransigent elite that insists on patting itself on the back as it destroys the middle out of greed and cupidity is an elite that will end up exterminated. There were no more patricians because those who could have chosen to just go along with the wise and moderate Gracchan reforms instead fought them tooth and nail…and ended up with Marius sticking their head on a pike or Augustus having them slain and their estates confiscated.
The same thing must be remembered now. America is not in a good way. The economy is rocky. Assets are overvalued, particularly when compared against incomes. No one with two brain cells to rub together trusts any of our institutions. Most of our cities are violent hellholes. That all can be corrected, but correcting it requires prudence and remaining in power. For MAGA to remain in power, the sort of policies that mean 11% of young guys are out of work—policies like H-1B imports and the like—need to be done away with, and those who have benefited from them need to make amends, at the very least.
H-1B visas and like forms of globalist cosmopolitanism that harm the American people are unacceptable, and are costing Trump support with demographics his successors will need to win—namely the young men who are most harmed by massive influxes of immigrants who take entry-level positions and work for low wages. When paired with usurious practices like 50-year mortgages, that is the same sort of toxic mix of usury and slave labor that killed the Roman Republic. It will kill ours too, if we let it, as those who are at least up for grabs19 by Republicans when Trump was promising to help them will just go for Zohran types for the reasons that Peter Thiel was articulating back in 2020.20
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The Indians are going ballistic about this, which is funny: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/us-immigration-authority-starts-issuing-demand-for-100k-h-1b-fee-visa-experts-decode-the-rise-in-demand-for-rfes/articleshow/125220328.cms
Most recently: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1988658092599390318
Exposed here, for example: https://x.com/AFpost/status/1873078736654065930
As Plutarch, describing this in his Life of Tiberius Gracchus, wrote:
Of the land which the Romans gained by conquest from their neighbours, part they sold publicly, and turned the remainder into common; this common land they assigned to such of the citizens as were poor and indigent, for which they were to pay only a small acknowledgment into the public treasury. But when the wealthy men began to offer larger rents, and drive the poorer people out, it was enacted by law that no person whatever should enjoy more than five hundred acres of ground. This act for some time checked the avarice of the richer, and was of great assistance to the poorer people, who retained under it their respective proportions of ground, as they had been formerly rented by them.
“Afterwards the rich men of the neighbourhood contrived to get these lands again into their possession, under other people’s names, and at last would not stick to claim most of them publicly in their own. The poor, who were thus deprived of their farms, were no longer either ready, as they had formerly been, to serve in war or careful in the education of their children; insomuch that in a short time there were comparatively few freemen remaining in all Italy, which swarmed with workhouses full of foreign-born slaves. These the rich men employed in cultivating their ground of which they dispossessed the citizens. Caius Lælius, the intimate friend of Scipio, undertook to reform this abuse; but meeting with opposition from men of authority, and fearing a disturbance, he soon desisted, and received the name of the Wise or the Prudent, both which meanings belong to the Latin word Sapiens.
…
“Tiberius, at his return from the campaign, found him to have got far beyond him in fame and influence, and to be much looked up to, he thought to outdo him, by attempting a popular enterprise of this difficulty and of such great consequence. But his brother Caius has left it us in writing, that when Tiberius went through Tuscany to Numantia, and found the country almost depopulated, there being hardly any free husbandmen or shepherds, but for the most part only barbarian, imported slaves, he then first conceived the course of policy which in the sequel proved so fatal to his family. Though it is also most certain that the people themselves chiefly excited his zeal and determination in the prosecution of it, by setting up writings upon the porches, walls, and monuments, calling upon him to reinstate the poor citizens in their former possessions.”
Very interesting comparison, thanks for writing
If we want a first world country we must pay first world compensation.
And Shakespeare was wrong: “first, let’s kill all the” oligarchs.