Do you ever wonder how the Empire of Rome in the west, one of the most remarkable and incredible feats of human management in all history, disintegrated and gave way to the Europe we all know and love? Have you ever wondered just how this unparalleled system of centralized government, this merging of military and bureaucracy fell from glory? And have you then looked in despair at the volume upon volume of works written on it by all those irritating 'scholars' that seem to insist there may not be a clean and easy answer or universal consensus? Have you ever wanted some internet cult leader to just say it how it is and give you the easily digestible answer without regard to petty things like 'fact?' Fuck no you haven't, you're far too reasonable and lacking of shrieking ideological mania.

But Stefan 'We were OBJECTIVELY freer' Molyneux is here to salve that burning desire. The desire to watch some smug internet pseudointellectual make a complete fracking fool of himself and get vicariously flayed by your truly, /u/breaksfull P. Esquire, who at the time of stumbling across this thesis by Molyneux had just finished Peter Heather's wonderful book The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, and naturally thought a match up between the Oxford professor of Late Antiquity and Early Medieval history and Mad Money Molyneux would be a delightful way to unload some of the accumulated hate and loathing that all souls toiling in Walmarts greasy craw have.

Volcanos of all gender orientations! I present! Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio LIVE

So we start off with Moly introducing the topic and saying how the fall of Rome is a direct parallel with the current fall of America. Not going to go down that rabbit hole (or other unrelated conspiratorial madness), but I will singe its fluffy tail by shattering his analogy. He'd have you think Rome's troubles began with the decline of Republicanism and the rise of Empire, somehow forgetting that Rome prospered as an Empire so much for centuries than they had to make a second Emperor just to run it all, and that the Eastern Empire (why does everyone always forget them?) prospered for hundreds of years more. Actually the mere existence of the East nullifies his whole argument and I could leave it there, but I haven't tasted enough blood yet.

Also he refers to Rome as a 'welfare state.' Okay free food in the city of Rome itself aside, I wouldn't call the Roman Empire a welfare state given that it has no resemblance to one at all. You'd think he'd be chomping at the bit over how most public buildings were constructed by private individuals for renown and prestige, but nope he just sticks to his anarchistic guns, because what could possibly fell any empire except statism and lack of free trade? What, you don't mean to imply that foreign invasion could have anything to do with it? So what if the East survived another thousand years?!

He does go in a somewhat new direction around the 1:30 mark, saying that Rome basically lost it's self-confidence and the iron will and brutality to rule an Empire because of centralized government/currency, and the institution of slavery stagnating development. Nevermind that slavery hadn't impeded Roman development during the preceding half millenia, but whatever. He goes on to perpetuate the myth of Hero's Engine saying 'they knew all about the steam engine' and implies they just never bothered to develop it lest the institute of slavery was threatened. Nevermind that they didn't actually have anything more than a neat little toy and nothing like an actual engine.

Honestly I could just refute every one of these points with 'But the East lasted another thousand years' (and prospered for many of them) which is ironic since he actually mentioned that the East lasted and prospered after the western fall at the start of the video. The other all-encompassing rebuttal is that even in the case of the West all the 'problems' he mentions were in place long before the western fall, so this idea of the woes of Empire suddenly piling up and striking after centuries of Western power and wealth rings shallow. For example his claim at 3:40 that the length of military service suddenly spiked to 20 years was something that happened over 500 years earlier as part of the Marian Reforms.

Around the videos midway point he blatantly displays his utter lack of knowledge of Roman history at all. He 'argues' that the Roman recruitment system and tax system were dependant on populations centralized in large cities and that collecting taxes and soldiers was impossible with a largely scattered agricultural society, and that the scattering of Romans from urban to rural life helped doom the Empire.

Now, The Roman Empire was quite urbanized for an ancient society. Rome itself had up to a million people at one point, and several other cities (Carthage, Antioch, Constantinople) had populations in the hundreds of thousands. That said, at best only about ten percent of the population lived in cities of some sort and for the most part the Empire was primarily populated by agricultural peasant farmers just like every other pre-modern society, and the Roman bureaucracy was pretty effective at ruthlessly collecting taxes from every scrap of Imperial land. This is pretty damning that Stefan has never read a single book about pre-modern societies and I genuinely question his claim of a Masters in History from the University of Toronto.

His completely flawed logical train choo-choo's its way onward. Since the Roman state (which was waaay less centralized than he makes it out to be, limitations of transportation and communication made most of the provinces outside of Italy largely self-governing) lost it's ability to tax and conscript an imaginary urban majority, it turned to hiring barbarian mercenaries which it couldn't pay because of a further devalued currency and a loss of taxable population (grrr you untaxable rural peasantry!) which lead to unpaid barbarian mercenaries sacking Rome.

So it goes without saying that this is completely wrong. While Rome's military evolved with the centuries and put more of a focus on cavalry than on it's infantry-focused predecessor, training and discipline in the Late Roman Army remained vicious and brutal, and the Western Roman Army by the time of the Late Empire was still by far the best fighting force in all of Europe and North Africa.

Now he plays into the myth that the army was 'barbarized' and the spots that used to be filled by loyal Roman citizens were now crewed by barbarian recruits of dubious loyalty. In fact the only difference in the Late Empire's policy on recruiting barbarians was that they were now recruited not only as auxiliaries -as Rome had done pretty much forever- but as rank and file soldiers, integrated with citizens into the frontline fighting units of the Roman army. But there are no sources from Late Antiquity that imply these barbarian recruits were anymore disloyal than any other drilled and trained Roman soldiers who were paid on a regular-ish basis. They trained, served, and then retired with a pension or a land plot and went home.

Now in the last decades of the Empire, a badly mauled Romany Army did become increasingly dependent on barbarian (mostly Visigothic) military alliances to deal with the ever-increasing threats it faced, and such reliance did weaken the Empires position. However they didn't do this because of untaxable peasants and centralized currency, it was because of Germanic intruders pillaging territory in Gaul, Spain, and worst of all in North Africa, which deprived the Empire of critical income to sustain a powerful field army.

And no Stefan, Rome's population did not go from a million to seventeen thousand in a 'couple of years' following the sack. Also which sack Stefan? Alaric's sacking of Rome which was remarkably tame for a sacking? Or the more severe sacking in 440 by Genseric? Neither caused a population drop anywhere near what he purports, which didn't occur until nearly a century later after the vicious Gothic Wars between the Byzantines and the Goths.

Moving on. Mercifully this is the least amount of Molyneux content I've had to endure in one sitting.

Actually that's about all he has to say on the Western collapse. He rambles on a bit how Islamic piracy fatally crippled the Byzantine Empire later and caused it's collapse which is an overexaggeration to say the least but it wouldn't be a proper Molyneux history lesson without some insert of how terrible the Muslims were to everything.

So in essence, Molyneux hasn't the skimpiest idea of what he's talking about. For his prefaces about having a 'masters in history' he doesn't seem to bother doing any research beyond the odd DailyMail article and the comments of his YouTube subscribers/cultists. His ideological dogma makes him obsessed with this idea that all of human history is tied around anarchistic ideas of the free market and decentralized power and he attempts to explain everything through this view model with a sprinkling of racism, and seems aghast at the idea that any silly historian could genuinely think an empire could fall from something as superficial as changing power dynamics, internal weakness, or invasion.

Sources: The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians by Peter Heather