was LBJ a good prez

favorite lines from the phone call?

mine is

>And make the pockets at least an inch longer, my money, my knife, everything falls out

>>1947989
One of the worst we've ever had.

>welfare state
no

>>1949010
Why? People laud the Roman Empire as the crowning achievement of humanity and at its peak it was a massive welfare state.

>>1949208
can you qualify that? I'm no expert but my understanding was that the poor in Rome lived in squalor and the farmers in the countryside were basically near-slave sharecroppers who could hardly even leave their land

>>1947989

>Vietnam
>Great Society was a failure
>let in hordes of third worlders with no job prospects and while america was in the shitter in 1964

No, he was shit.

>>1949299
To be fair I'd find it hard to name any other potential President from that era who wouldn't have gone into Vietnam

>>1949412

>everyone would have done that anyway!

shit excuse anon

>>1949412
It's not a question of getting in, it's a question of how long you're going to stay. Someone like Goldwater might have NOPE'd out of Vietnam once momentum began to fade. There's also the issue of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident being precipitated, which calls into question the tone of a potential intervention.

>>1949412
>>1949412
Kennedy.

Really, if Nixon had been elected in 1960 I would be shocked if he did.

>>1949296
You see, originally the Roman Republic was comprised mainly of smallholding farmers that fought in the legions when needed.

Unfortunately, the various wars Rome got into required them to leave their farms for a long period of time, at which point enterprising businessmen tended to steal their land.

Eventually, the number of people who actually owned land was so low that owning land had to be scrapped as a requirement to join the legions, which is what directly led to Sulla, Julius, and ultimately the empire.

Because the common man in Rome could no longer farm for a living, and there weren't a lot of jobs in the cities, they tended to form into client mobs, which is basically like a BLM protest for hire type deal.

In order to keep the common rabble from rioting, the emperors began to bring in more and more grain from Egypt, and put more and more people on the dole. This is where the whole "bread and circuses" idea came from.

As time went on, the finances of the Roman empire got worse and worse, because it was impossible to cut military spending at any point without being the target of an assassination or coup. The burden of this expenditure fell on a smaller and smaller tax base. After a series of plagues, the Roman tax base was so heavily overtaxed that their population couldn't even grow to rebound from the plague and make use of all the abandoned land.

1/2

>>1949565
The situation got so bad that during a crop failure, the farmers would be the first people to starve, because the people in the cities were on the dole, and the tax man would take everything to support them.

The farmers then did the logical thing, they would avoid any representative of the Roman state, and flee to the cities if they could.

Diocletian, who was the one who scrapped the entire idea of pretending to still be a republic, had the bright idea to require people to do whatever job their fathers had done, to prevent the depopulation of the countryside, and ban farmers from leaving the farms.

Unfortunately, this didn't benefit the Roman state so much as the land-owners, who at this point were small and number and extremely powerful politically. The Romans began to abandon trade entirely and focus their entire economy on self contained villas owned by a rich guy.

This is directly where feudalism came from in Europe.

TL;DR

Republican Roman people = Independent farmers

Principate Roman people = Welfare queens

Dominate Roman people = serfs

>>1949208
Rome wasn't a crowning achievement because of its welfare state


also the entire idea of SS and Medicare/Medicaid is fucking awful. They take money from the young and working and give it to the old and dying. It's like the opposite of an investment.