The Long, Agonizing Decline of the United StatesBy Thomas E. BrewtonWe are following the downward path of Great Britain, one of the two  greatest of Western history's empires.We can draw several cautionary lessons from the history of our  British cousins.  Of all the world's nations we and the UK are most  similar, both in our rise and in our decline.In addition to sharing the English language, our whole constitutional  ethos and legal system derive from the British constitution and from  the common law.  Ours are the principal nations that made the  sovereign's right to taxation subject to the will of the people  expressed in Parliament and our state and national legislatures.Most especially, ours were the only nations that arose upon the  primacy of private property rights.  It was this fundamental element  of natural law that, more than anything else, accounted for English  and American individualism.  It was an ethos that the German Empire's  Iron Chancellor Bismarck contemptuously dismissed as a society of  shopkeepers, as opposed to the Prussian landed aristocracy.  It was,  however, an ethos that twice bested the statist collectivism of  Continental Europe in world wars.Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" (published in 1776) demonstrated  that wealth and higher standards of living emanated, not from the  political state, but from the sum of individuals working in  conditions of political liberty, most especially private property  rights.Underlying the whole was Protestant Christianity, here and in  England, that dictated that each individual soften his heart and seek  the wisdom of God via the Holy Spirit.  In life's most fundamental  aspect - being a good citizen, hewing to moral principle, and doing  the right thing - Christianity relegated the national state to a  subordinate role.The root cause of Great Britain's decline and of ours is the  disavowal of Christianity and the adoption of the secular,  materialistic religion of socialism.Socialism upends the individualism, self-reliance, and moral  imperative of the Christian ethos, transferring all of it to the  political state.  Individuals, burdened by huge taxes and trained  over the generations to look to the government for everything, become  passive and focused almost exclusively upon personal sensual  gratification.Peace at any price is rationalized under socialism's phantasmic  vision of world government administered by councils of intellectuals,  whose superior knowledge (materialistic gnosticism) will bring about  harmony among all peoples, ending crime and war.Families and personal responsibility decline in frequency and  importance, to be replaced by sexual promiscuity, drug abuse, and  unmarried mothers with morally untethered children.  Crime rates  rise, personal saving declines, and people become wards of the  political state, believing that they are entitled, without regard to  personal effort, to a share in all of society's goods.Great Britain's history limns our future.By the time of the Napoleonic wars after the French Revolution, Great  Britain had far and away the world's greatest navy, which both  protected the empire and kept open the world's sea lanes of  commerce.  In 19th and early 20th centuries, more than 50% of all  world trade was carried in British ships; London was the world's  undisputed financial capital, and the greatest city in the world;  Great Britain's was the greatest empire since that of Rome and, by  far, the largest ever in geographic extent.  Unlike other modern  empires, however, it was based, not on military conquest of land, but  upon control of world commerce.The period of England's greatest strides in wealth creation and  rising standards of living occurred before the Victorian era's drive  to expand the Empire around the world.  Of course, addition of India  and other Asian parts of the Empire increased wealth enormously, but  already government was beginning to supplant the individualism that  came to prominence in the Elizabethan era.England was bled close to economic death by World War I.  She lost  roughly one million young men to the battlefield cemeteries of the  Continent.  In the 1920s there were not enough sons to learn and to  carry on the entrepreneurial individualism of England's smaller,  family owned companies that were the basis of her economy.  Premature  efforts to return to the gold standard in the 1920s and thereby to  reclaim London's place as the world financial capital came up short.Labor union unrest in the 20s, then the Depression in the 1930s, led  to triumph of socialism after World War II.  Labor unions, an iconic  element of socialist mythology, introduced intractable wage rigidity,  so that British industry was unable to reduce production costs to  levels sufficiently competitive to allow resumption of England's  traditional economy of world trade.  Along with labor unions'  imposition of ever-upward wage costs and wage rigidity came steadily  rising unemployment and inflation.People lost confidence in their destiny, sapped by the one-world  phantasm of the socialist international, and preferred a role of  increasing passivity.In fundamental respects, our Vietnam War experience and the rise of  socialist labor unions under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal paralleled  England's early steps down the slope of decline.Just as Tocqueville reported in post-Revolutionary France, under  socialism people become self-centered and care only about their  entitlements dispensed by government.  They will endure any degree of  tyranny and loss of political and economic liberty, so long as it is  imposed in the name of social justice, i.e., equality and world- government.  This ethos is fit only for subordination to more  vigorous and self-confident nations.